This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Image / Text Novels
A typical novel is usually printed in black and white, with little to no imagery: think of paperbacks that smell like newsprint and contain pages of justified text. Yet more and more examples can be seen of novels, both fiction and nonfiction, that push the boundaries of text and images in unconventional ways.
The book VAS: An Opera in Flatland is a unique novel that offers a visually rich, hybrid narrative. Author Steve Tomasula and illustrator Stephen Farrell use an exquisite array of visual concepts to illustrate the unique storyline. Another novel that does this in a more subtle way is the book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Throughout the novel, the author intersperses devices such as black-and-white photographs, video stills, typographic experiments, graphic elements, and even blank pages to emphasize the poignant narrative of a child’s reality following 9/11.
Graphic designer, book artist, and performer Warren Lehrer is internationally known for his many books that incorporate text and imagery. These include Versations, I Mean You Know, French Fries, Nicky D. from L.I.C., Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America, and his latest book The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley: a life in books. Lehrer has been influential in crossing boundaries among words, design, art, and performance in both fictional and documentary narratives. His lectures are a combination of visual presentation and theater performance. As Lehrer says, “I’m interested in re-evaluating the rote way we tend to use language, the more pedestrian way we go about writing... I compose text and stories and when it is put into book form, I use typography as the vehicle to see that text realized so it becomes a composition.”5
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Hypertext fiction
Non-traditional ways of reading, such as hypertext fiction, allow the reader to move through the narrative structure however they choose. Click on one link and you might end up rescuing people, but click on another link, you might fight in a battle. In essence, readers choose their own path in the narrative. An example of this in book form is the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series, in which the reader chooses a particular page and creates a new narrative.
Storyspace and HyperCard, two early hypertext programs, paved the way for more complex interactive environments. The use of hypermedia today extends far beyond these early programs, into stories, games, the Internet, art, and design. The hypertext fiction book Grammatron, by the artist and writer Mark Amerika, became a landmark cyber-novel and was one of the first pieces of Internet art to be accepted into the 2000 Whitney Biennial.6
Graphic novels / Comics
The term “graphic novel” typically refers to a comic-book-style story with an extended narrative, bound into a book form. This visual art form evolved from traditional comics, and over the past 10–15 years has become somewhat of a cult genre.
The graphic novel is a powerful visual storytelling medium, with its use of iconic visual language, hand-written type, and diverse sequencing of narratives. Graphic novels can help visual thinkers interpret and explore subject matter from historic to fantastical in new ways with few restrictions. They utilize literary devices such as symbolism, simile, allegory, and metaphor just as traditional books do, but their unique nature asks the reader to dig a little deeper into interpreting the story.
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In 1969, the author John Updike (who was interested in becoming a cartoonist as a child) was giving a lecture addressing various new ways a novel might be presented. He stated: “I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic strip novel masterpiece”.7
While Updike’s lone genius theory has been realized in such masterpieces like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, more often graphic novels are group efforts, just as plays and films are. For example, the noir take on Batman, The Long Halloween, sports an almost film-length credit list: it’s written by Jeph Loeb, drawn by Tim Sale, has colors by Gregory Wright, letters by Richard Starkings and Comicraft, and thanks the creator of Batman, Bob Kane.
While many are quick to write off comics as foolish escapism, a new breed of comics has emerged that tells powerful personal narratives. In Art Spiegelman’s Maus, we see a child of Holocaust survivors come to understand both his parents’ eccentricities and their nightmarish past, told visually with Jews portrayed as mice and Germans as cats.
This visualization doesn’t soften the all-too-familiar stories of gas chambers and mass burial, but rather the use of familiar childhood symbols increases the dread and horror.
The simple drawings of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (video) allows us to place ourselves in the story of a rock-and-roll girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution. Their abstract nature somehow allows us to relate to something alien to Western culture.
Even superheroes have grown up in modern graphic novels; Alan Moore’s Watchmen looks at psychosis as a source of “dressing up to fight crime” and represents it visually in Rorschach’s ink-blot mask.
One of the best ways to learn about comics is to read the bestselling book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. In this over 200 page black- and-white comic book, McCloud cleverly illustrates and analyzes the history of narrative structures and how words and pictures work together to communicate ideas.
- The following list of noteworthy graphic novels/comics reveals a wide variety of stories, from the more classic “superhero” genre (Watchmen and Dark Knight), to Sandman’s straddling classical and comic mythology, to Maus’s personal retelling of history.
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman (1992 Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
Bone: One Volume Edition by Jeff Smith
Palestine, Safe Area Goražde, The Fixer by Joe Sacco
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
Fun Home; a family tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Zap Comix, Keep On Truckin’ by R Crumb
American Splendor by Harvey Pekar
- With so many exciting examples in our image/text-rich culture, now is a great time to explore narrative structures and how the visual and verbal work together. The interesting visual-verbal connections in presentations, illustrated novels, interactive stories, and highly visual graphic novels add richness to the ways we communicate. Working with a visual project as a narrative strengthens both your verbal and your visual thinking. So, think about your next project as a story and explore the many ways it can be told.
Internet narrative
The Internet is a perfect tool to explore a narrative structure. Each time you click on a website or a link, you have created a path or thread. Create a short written narrative based on the last 10 links or sites you visited on the Internet. How could you write a story based on the order of your exploration?
Look at a picture
Find an image with people in it and think about what they see when they are looking outside the frame of the picture. This forces you to write from a different point of view.
Making marks
Find an existing artifact that contains writing (for example, an old phone book or a brown grocery bag) and make marks (visual, words) over the existing text to create a new visual piece.
Open the mystery drawer
Everyone has a drawer (usually in the kitchen) filled with random objects such as keys, pennies, old batteries, birthday candles, matchbooks, and tape. Determine the order the objects seem to have been added to the drawer and base a narrative on that.
Find five quotes
Find five quotes that inspire you about art or design. Next, write a one-page story and insert these quotes within the story, as part of the narrative. This can be a personal narrative, fiction, or a combination. Place quote marks around the quotes, but it is not necessary to include who said the quote within the story. (The citation can be place at the very end of your story.)