Comics v. Novels

Given our readings this semester, what can a comic or graphic novel do ‘better’ than a traditional story or novel? What are its (comic or graphic novel) limitations?

Depending on who you ask, comics be either better or worse than traditional stories. Those who don’t know comics may associate them with childhood. Others may read comics as an intersection of novel writing and art, allowing for more creativity than in a traditional novel. After reading novels my whole life and comics specifically this semester, I can now see that they can each do things the other can’t.

                  Comics and graphic novels are like complex picture books for adults. The combination of writing and drawing allows the writer to include subtle details in images that couldn’t have been written in the text of a traditional story. For example, the famous boots in chapter 1 of Watchmen are an important clue seen in the drawing rather than in the words. If that panel were to be written out in a novel, the author probably wouldn’t have said that only one boot was slouched, so that clue probably wouldn’t exist. In comics, collaboration is easier. Students who have ever been assigned a group paper know how hard it is to mesh more than one persons’ ideas and writing styles into a coherent, cohesive essay. Similarly, collaborating in a novel is possible, but hard. With different people writing, drawing, and coloring, comics encourage collaboration. The benefit of this is that many ideas and styles may be incorporated into one comic, and unlike in a group paper at school in which the ideas and styles are all in the form of writing, comic collaboration uses many mediums and actually works.

                  On the other hand, comics do have some shortcomings compared to traditional novels. Sometimes, there may be a lot to say. Since panels are limited in space, and in order to leave enough room for drawings, few words can be used. In the text-heavy Wonder Woman, we often saw the text boxes and speech bubbles took up a lot of the space in the panels, almost to the point that readers became overwhelmed with the number of words they would have to read. Traditional novels do not have this problem, as they exist for the purpose of communicating using words. Comic writers must go through the difficulty of finding the balance between word and image, and if they can’t find that balance, then the readers get distracted.

                  I definitely would not say that one type is better than the other. Novels can be more effective for some types of stories, but for others, comics may be the more effective. It’s interesting that if the same story were to be told in these two ways, the results, and the audiences who read them, might be very different. I’m sure I’ll be reading more comics in the future.