Pictures
Describe
a time when you were reading a text with pictures and the pictures changed the
experience. How about this morning? I woke up way to early and decided to read web
comics to pass the time. This isn’t overly unusual as I follow around twenty to
twenty five comics daily, but back to this mourning. Reading text with pictures seems to have both
a positive and negative effect. Positively,
the artist and author can defiantly be sure they are communicating the right
message with facial expressions, color and shape of the eyes, the color filter
of the background, the fact that there is a constant background, and it all
just seems to flow together to form a cohesive story. It’s amazing and I’d imagine it to be quite
difficult depending on the level of detail. But that is how I read into web
comics; the images let me see exactly what the author/artist wanted me to see.
That is also the negative though. That
is the negative in that I only see what the author/artist wants me to see. There is no imagination on my part, no “everyone
sees the characters in a different and unique way.” For people that do not have
very active imaginations, I can see why that might be a plus but I personally
have a very active imagination. Always have and I consider myself lucky that I
got to keep it after my childhood. It
seems a lot of people seem to lose their imagination when they get introduced
into the world, at least that’s how it seems to me. But I’ve always enjoyed imagining
what characters look like in novels and what the back ground might look like. I
might miss an emotional inflection on those dry colorless pages but I think
that it is more than compensated for with the colorful images that fill my head
when I read.
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I think your choice of comics was a really good choice. That is a classic example of how the artist uses pictures or visuals to tell a story. I think its cool that you held onto your youths imagination.
ReplyDeleteIt is true that pictures can limit the reader's imagination while interpreting the text. The picture shows you exactly what characters look like and in most cases the details of an action sequence. Example: In written form you read, "Billy fell down the stairs." but then if i provide a picture for this action and show a banana peel on the stairs, the visual tells me exactly the reason for the fall.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, though, in comics the readers mind is most active in the white space between the panels. This is what comic book artists and theorists call "the gutter". When showing a subject-to-subject sequence, their is a lot of reader involvement happening between the panels in order to make sense of the sequence. An example would be one panel depicting a bad guy coming at another guy with a knife and the following panel having a word bubble with "AHHHHH!" and a view of the home where the action is taking place from the outside. In this sequence, the reader fills in the action/attack/murder between these panels.
If you are interesting in learning more about how comics work, Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics is very helpful. Its a book about comics written in comic form. I recommend it highly.
I love it when I have spelling errors and am grammatically incorrect in my post when I'm supposed to be the instructor! Yikes! ;)
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