What is the Future for Comics? The Limitations and Advantages of the Comic Art Form

I find that the ways in which comics excel over writing and text are unique only to comics, while where they fall short plagues all written word, especially in competing against TV and other digital technologies today.

The first reason in which comics excel over traditional writing is their ability to appeal to a wider audience and spread their messages as widely as possible. This is true in both comics created for adults, such as editorial cartoons, as well as those made for kids. For editorial comics, specifically of the single panel variety, a person does need to have some idea of what is going on in a political situation to understand the work itself, but in terms of purely getting messages across, it is much easier to view and understand a single panel vs. a pages long article. In a single panel editorial comic, an artist can get a single message (i.e. Obama's policy of dealing with ISIS) across to a reader in no time, and can add elements to the photo which carry other contexts and details of the story/situation with it. All in all, it is a much simpler type of communication, and one that is admittedly far more interesting and fun to interact with than a purely written piece. For more subtle political commentary in comics (compared to one-panel editorial comics), such as Tatsumi's comments on life in post-war Japan, the messages are carried on easily consumable pictures and storylines, and appear organically in the reading of the comic. Beyond political comics and cartoons, the wide appeal and readability of comics can have positive effects as a teaching tool for young children--a major demographic of readers for comics. We saw this in Tezuka's inclusion of real scientific information in The Mysterious Underground Men--comic books can be legitimate teaching devices that can be even more effective in conveying information vs. pure writing or lectures as those who are reading it may understand concepts better in a drawn form. Along with hard information being conveyed better in comic books, soft moral concepts can be easily observed, especially in earlier superhero comics such as in Superman. While he wasn't always totally law-abiding, Superman taught, and still teaches, very basic moral codes such as the importance of helping strangers or others that are in need of help, and holding those who do bad things accountable. Things like morals, which are not always easy to explain, especially to children, are instantly better understood in the context of a high-flying, exciting superhero.

One other, larger way in which comics are superior is in storytelling. The most obvious example of which is the depiction of action. Action is just one of those elements of storytelling that needs some type of picture to do it justice. One of the reasons this is is because there's only so many words one can use to describe the actions of a human being (let alone a superhuman), the natural movements that we make without any words or without saying anything. The only way to get the full picture and to fully understand what is going on in an action sequence is through pictures, and obviously comics excel at this. Another way in which comics excel at storytelling is through the conveyance of the complex contexts surrounding a story or event. This is because with pictures, things like color, shading, and textures can often convey feelings and subtexts of moments in time that regular words cannot. Color, for example, can express an emotion such as muted colors for sadness or a turn in the story that the connotations of words doesn't get across. Lastly, there are many actions, situations, or scenes that are hard to write about thanks to gruesomeness or taboo. Here too, pictures excel where words fail. Think of Tatsumi, and his wide-ranging subject matter in Good-bye. How does one write about a man that is obsessed with women's feet and fantasizes about getting trampled to death? How do you describe all the feelings--fear, sadness, lust--that accompanies this desire? Through his comic, Tatsumi makes this taboo understandable and viewable, more real than to read it through simple writing. Overall, comics provide a roundness of storytelling that writing cannot, providing a whole range of ideas and contexts that just words on a page do not approach.

Like I previously mentioned, the limitations of comics or graphic narratives are most apparent in todays fast-paced, TV and digital media environment. The first issue with comics is emblematic, in my opinion, of more abstract art in general (did I mention I have no experience in Art? please don't take offense). This is the problem of obscuring the story, which I find some of the more nuanced or experimental comic layouts and art do often. If we think back to when we looked at all the different takes on "Little Red Riding Hood", this limitation becomes abundantly clear. In this case, the story was so well known that it was painfully clear in the most out-there renditions that they related only in the most minor, tangential way to the fairytale. This limitation is even more clear in storylines that are less clear--situations in which the art must complement and sometimes carry the story. Without some semblance of straightforward art direction, a story can be completely decimated, often losing large themes or metaphors that are essential to the plot. The straightforwardness of writing often doesn't suffer from these issues.

Lastly, comics fall short when compared to television or videogames in the aspect it does best: conveying action. This is no fault of comics, but rather a reality of the media landscape we live in. How can static, 2D pictures on a page possibly compete with the high-intensity images of television or videogames? Instead of reading about batman, we can now be batman, choosing our own way to beat up bad guys rather than leaving it to someone else to decide. Of course, I'm being a bit over dramatic, but the issues comics are facing now are the issues faced by many other older media forms. In our connected, digital world, younger people are much more likely to turn on their TV or Nintendo than pick up a book--comic or otherwise. It's a sad reality, and one that the titans of comics--DC and Marvel--have embraced, as they signed and have produced massive deals for superhero movies, videogames, and more. This leads to a larger question about the future viability of comics. It's no secret that comics aren't as popular as they were during the Golden Age (erego why it's called that), and the limitations of the art form is partially to blame, with new art forms causing the rest of the issues. I hope that the non-mainstream creators and publishers of comics can keep the art form afloat, and I do think there will always be a place in American society for comics, however the size of the that place is still to be determined.