Thursday, October 22, 2015
Text and Image
I think that the Wellin trip highlighted the impact that text has on the interpretation of cartoons. I felt that rather than hindering my understanding of what the image was trying to communicate, I was better able to grasp the meanings of cartoons that were not in English. In the cartoons with captions and dialogue that I could read I probably placed too much importance on it and the text distracted me from the greater point that was being made. Conversely, when I devoted the entirety of my attention to the image due to the fact that I was not able to read the text I was not lead astray by misinterpretations of the text. My experience with this relationship between text and image is best exemplified by Honore Daumier's "Menelas Vainqueur" and Thomas Nast's "His Record".
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I too was surprised by how cumbersome the captions featured in most of the English cartoons were. Of course, we are quite removed from the conventions of speaking and humor that were present during the creation of these cartoons, but even so, I found that the text boxes were wordy and overdone, drowning the otherwise direct cartoons in unnecessary textual detail. This is probably why I found Thomas Nast's "At Liberty's Door" so effective. This cartoon, with its illustrative splendor, only uses a few fragments of text to make its point. As a result, each word used takes on greater significance, enhancing the surrounding drawing rather than cluttering it.
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