In which one sees the light

[hazelk]

I’ve been annoying people on Whedonesque again. Not even about anything particularly righteous either just comics. It’s odd because it’s not as if I were really much of a comic book fan, I’ve read three American style books and the omnibus of Clover and that’s it unless you count Astérix chez les Bretons on a French exchange visit or the odd copy of the Beano. Still it’s always profoundly puzzled me when other people, equally new to the story-telling medium, seem to find it so much more opaque than non-graphic novels or film or TV. You read the words and look at the pictures, what more could there be to it? Don’t people (sighted people) learn to read pictures before they even learn to read? But puzzle no more. Today I had to mark a set of embryology practicals and obviously some of the variation had to do with application but it was striking how little some of the class were able to describe compared with others even though all of them had the same images and specimens to observe. Reading images critically and interpreting their sequence takes a certain aptitude (and a lot of practice). It’s something I’ve had to do for most of my working life so it’s hardly surprising that reading comics feels like a natural thing to do. And now I feel stupid for not seeing that connection before.

Comments

[oursin]

In spite of misspent years of youth reading my brother's collection of comic books (not to mention a whole range of other comics), I still have difficulty coming to grips with manga, go figure - I think it is about practice in reading images in certain ways.

[hazelk]

Reading Clover was a little like watching a foreign art movie although I think the artiness actually helped because it was so full of space. Other manga I've seen it's looked hard to keep up with the density of the frames but the more difficult thing may be the black and whiteness. All the images I'm used to have colour.

[aquaeri]

I think I'm pretty good with imagery in general - but while I tried pretty determinedly to read comics for a good while as a child, I just never enjoyed it.

And I've figured out as an adult that it's because most comics for adults employ conventions for recognising characters from frame to frame that don't work for me - I've got to spend a lot of time figuring out if what I'm looking at is the same character as in the previous frame or someone else, and if it's a character who last appeared several pages or issues ago, forget it. They just don't look consistently like the same person, to me.

And I don't have any problem recognising people in the flesh or on TV (although I seem to use voice quite a bit when I recognise actors), so I think it's a particular convention of comic illustration that just isn't working for me.

[hazelk]

That's interesting. I've only really founf it problem when they dis a character reveal that was supposed to show that X, who'd we'd heard talking and seen but not seen the face of was actually Y and I only figured it was Y when that was made explict in the next issue. I guess that means that visula cues alone aren't sufficient. I do skip around a lot while I'm reading, even more than for non-graphic novels and part of that has to do with checking who's speaking but it doesn't seem to take me out of the flow of the story.