Dresden Codak — Show vs. Tell: Why "Visual" is Not Optional

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Show vs. Tell: Why “Visual” is Not Optional

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Marshall McLuhan coined the famous phrase “the medium is the message,” meaning that the information within a medium and the medium itself are irrevocably intertwined.  How the viewer/reader/etc. receives the information is part of the information itself.  Different media generate different experiences.  Even reading a sentence on a piece of paper activates a different part of the brain than having someone read that same sentence to you.  From the standpoint of an artist, how we convey “content” is not separate from content itself.  It's all content.  Content is what we present to the readers.

The reason I bring this up is that there’s often an attitude amongst certain creators that the visuals “don’t matter” as much in comics, citing that elaborate visuals can and often distract from the “content,” which they see as the story, text or joke.  This is a misinterpretation of the medium (as described above), but it also makes the mistake of conflating elaborate with effective.  Elaborate visuals are not always the same as effective visuals.  Effective visuals are essential to comics, while elaborate visuals depend on context and personal style.  As such, the comic artist is obligated to show information via the visual narrative as effectively as possible, rather than tell the reader through excessive text or other misplaced expositional devices.

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Don’t be fooled by the stickmen: Pictures for Sad Children is one of the most visually sophisticated webcomics ever.  Its visuals are anything but elaborate, but they are effective, and employ many of the essential visual tools previously mentioned in this blog.  When I say “effective” I specifically mean it efficiently conveys the vital information and intended mood.  Despite the minimalism posing and virtual lack of facial expressions, the characters have a great deal of emotion coming out, and it’s largely because of the expert blocking and layouts.  Let’s take a closer look at the above comic:

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There are a lot of advanced techniques being used here.  In particular there’s an aggressive use of negative space as an active player in the action, as well as tactful employment of “pauses,” which are panels that are mainly used to better define the pace of the reading.  This helps clarify and emphasize other panels, similar to how (in the last article) negative space can be used to separate two focal points. The majority of information given to us is not spoken by a character, but rather implied via the visuals.  Imagine how dull this strip would be if it was reduced to a repeating flat shot of three characters delivering the same lines.

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Johnny Wander, while more realistic in its renderings than PFSC, is still fairly minimal with regards to visuals without losing any effectiveness.  There’s a masterful establishment of rhythm and tempo in the above page, with very clear high’s and low’s with regards to panel intensity.  There’s a buildup to the punch that’s very clearly executed.

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Straight text writing is largely geared toward conjuring an image in the mind of the reader in the absence of literal images.  Comics use both, and as a consequence an overuse of text ends up competing with the images rather than working with them.  Because comics are a visual narrative above all else, it’s important, when laying out a comic, that one considers the visuals first and the details of the text second.  The literal text should never lead the images, because one runs the risk of telling the audience rather than showing them.  With comics, text augments the image, not the other way round.  Remember, comics are the art of compression.  They are not “picture books.”

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Nick Gurewitch describes his cartooning process as trying to say as much as he can with images, and only then adding dialog when the images are insufficient at completing the idea.  He’s also famously said that humor is simply tragedy sped up, which is one reason comics are so well suited for comedy in the first place.  They can set lead us one way and pull the rug out from under us in such a brief duration.  So much information is shown to us in a brief instant:

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It’s a poor strategy to view pictures and words as ratios to be managed in a comic.  They are not competing elements, but part of one tool: the visual narrative.  If you strip away the visual language you’re just telling someone an idea; you’ve altered the context and changed the content.  "Content" is not a separate concept that transcends the execution of that concept, but an integral part of the product as a whole.  In other words, “the medium is the message.”

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