Are comic books better than ‘normal’ books?
I’m now working on my first non-comic book, my first, as it were, ‘normal’ book - with words and no images. But I’m wondering if receiving it in my hands sometime next year will feel as fulfilling, as pleasing, as when I receive one of my comic books? After all, apart from the cover a normal text book it just, ah, words. A page of words after another page of words, and then another, for 200 pages or so and then it’s done. Huh, that’s it? It’s just words? Not very interesting to look at! The most visually appealing bit is the cover and back cover.
To be crude about it we could say that a comic book is a book with 100s of covers + time. It has the image and text mix that a book cover has, and that mix across 100's or 1000's of panels is arranged in a certain sequential order, which has time in it.
I recall one occasion, in a writers conference, having a spirited debate with a professor of literature who had a scathing opinion about the merits of comic books (yet was open minded enough to come to my own talk). He said 'But books don't NEED images.' My reply was: 'Right, they don't...but IF they have them there is something added, something extra which text books don't have .'
So, if we wanted to be contentious, we could can make a pretty good case for saying that a comic book is BETTER than a text only book. I suddenly remember those old packet of crisps (‘chips’ for you Americans!) in which the crisps were plain flavour, but there was a wee packet of salt inside the main packet, which you could add to the mix. A text only book is a like a packet of plain crips; a comic book is a packet of crips with flavour added. Nice!
The key thing a text only book has over a comic book is quantity. The amount of words per page is always more. But does not have an advantage in quality of words, despite most people thinking it does, since a comic book can be at just as high a level of sophistication as a text only book (depending on subject, age range and the writer). But text only books certainly have more words per page. And that is a major advantage. It’s like the difference between an old 7 inch single and a long player LP - there is just more songs on it. A 100 page book will have perhaps 35,000 to 40,000 words; but a 100 page comic book might have only about 8,000 - 16,000, depending on what type of comic book it is. Basically half or only a quarter as many words per page. Therefore text only books can go into their subject in much greater depth than comic books of the same length, which is a very good thing. But the single/LP analogy above is not quite right. Because the comic has, so to speak, the songs AND another layer, the visuals - whereas the LP just has songs, nothing else. Therefore maybe the comic is more like a music video? There is less actual music on it than the full CD, but it has images too.
We might also make an argument for saying that the fact the text is split into chunks in a comic book, into dialogue, captions and spaced out among panels is a limitation of a certain type. Certain grammatical limitations might be there, or certain punctuation aspects rarely seen. The semi colon is quite rare in comics for instance; which might be one of the reasons why I’m still not quite sure how to use them (was that use just there correct, for example?). The flow of narrative we see in a text book across paragraphs may be lost in a comic, we might say - or, at least, different. Possibly, or perhaps there is little difference.
We night argue that the images in comic books are distracting or limiting. Reading a comic requires different cognitive processes, or lights up different areas in our neural networks, etc. Because we need to see the words and the images and also the interplay between the two. In a text book you only need to see the words. Oh, and also the little empty spaces between them (which I still find astonishing that Japanese and Chinese languages don’t have, with their habit of having one long continuous line of characters with no spaces between for each sentence). For some people having to look at the text and images and the interplay between them is confusing, even annoying. They don’t know how to ‘read’ comics. How to move the eye across the page, from which panel to which, in what direction, in what order (text first or images first or what?), etc. It may be more relaxing, easy, enjoyable just to read words. Nice and simple.
That’s a significant point. However, if reading a text only book is more simple than reading a comic book how is it that comic books are considered the lower house here? In the bicameral relationship of the two how is it that the less challenging format is considered the superior house? How is it that the more cognitively challenging comic books are considered the realm of supposedly less sophisticated children? Let’s have some consistency to the argument! Are comic books a less challenging read or a more challenging one? If they are, as seems almost definitely the case, a more complicated reading experience, in terms of cognitive functioning, because of the text and image layers… then, are they not the superior format? Aren’t comic books ‘better’ than text only books?
How could we rate that superiority? Various studies by psychologists and educators have indicated that the amount of info we recall is higher if we read it in a comic book format when compared to a text only format. Also that resistance to learning information is less if its presented in comic book form. For example this study appearing in the academic journal CBE Life Sciences Education, which notes: "...nonmajors’ content scores and attitudes showed a statistically significant improvement after using the comic book, particularly among those with lower content knowledge at the start of the semester...Taken all together, our results suggest that, with regard to student learning, comic book stories lose nothing to traditional textbooks while having the added potential benefit of improving attitudes about biology." If that is so, and the amount and quality of such studies indicates it is so, then comic books are better for learning than text only books. Surely the fact the almost all school text books included photos and images and graphs is partly an indication that a text/image mix is recognised as being useful.
I note another valid point above: limitation. If a text only book notes ‘The ivy was not yet fully in bloom, its yellow younglings striving for sun and rain to make them really green.’ then each of us can imagine the colour of the ivy and feel the striving toward growth there, etc. In a comic book we could have exactly the same text but there is also a drawing, perhaps in colour, of those yellow young leaves. Isn’t that a limitation on the imagination? We dont have to see it in our mind, to make that effort. It's there on the page, fixed to THAT look. There are, then, perhaps some cognitive processes that are being switched on more in a text book. Less in terms of our perceptual tools, because there is no art for our eyes to see; but possibly more in other elements of neural activity, in the processes of our ’neural imagination’.
Well, maybe. But some comic books won’t just show the ivy ‘straight’. There might be at the top of the panel a caption box with the words inside it of: ‘The ivy was not yet fully in bloom, its yellow youngling striving for sun and rain to make them really green.’ But then the image under that may not be of the ivy, but of a person looking at the ivy. So the image is adding info not merely repeating it, it's telling us more. There might even be something really odd in the art. Same words again there, but the image connected to it is of Donald Trump crying in his pants (again for American readers: I mean in his underwear!). Seeing that we will be confused, but stimulated, both in terms of our perceptual processing and the related neural activity associated with meaning making, pattern recognition, etc. ‘What’s the connection there!?… Is Trump’s yellowish hair connected to the colour of the ivy? Huh?’
One thing we have to note is that a text only book can simply NOT have that juxtaposition aspect going on. It doesn’t have images! We could write more words, and have it: ‘The ivy was not yet fully in bloom, its yellow youngling striving for sun and rain to make them really green. Donald, feeling this to be some kind of symbol for his failed presidency, stood there in his pants, and cried.’ And that creates the link for us with more words. It could be made even more clear than that or left vague or done in a variety if ways. But still, it has no images. In this case the obvious point is that the text/image mix does the same job in less words. It’s more efficient, if you like. And efficiency is an important thing in terms of less time needed, less trees cut down because less paper is needed, etc.
We also might say that the comics presentation of this image or feeling is more imaginative. We need to do more in order to process the odd connection between the words and the art. It’s also more of a shock. That surprising text and image juxtaposition is more stimulating in terms of processing and remembering. I bet you will remember it tomorrow. Or, to somewhat prove my whole point, you may remember the image of Trump crying in his pants looking at the yellow ivy, but you may not recall all the words. If so, isn’t that because our ability to process and recall visuals is greater than our ability to process and recall text? If so, aren’t comic books better than text only books? They have text AND images.
Ah ha, got you!
Of course I love 'text only books', I love novels, I love non-fiction books. I read a lot of them - and a I read a lot of comic books, of graphic novels. We don't need to say comic books are better than text books. It's not a point I would seriously push. But they certainly have something that the other format does not. And for all the advantages that brings they should be more highly thought of, more read, more used.