Text vs. Images - Are comics a visual medium?

Of all the numerous subjects that get me worried and keep me from sleeping well at night, one that has been particularly annoying lately is the relationship between text and images in comics. No pun intended, but where do we draw the line between them? Which one is more important?

Yesterday I was reading “On Writing for Comics” by Kurt Busiek, and he said something that I find rather dangerous. I quote his text:

The single most important factor in plotting comics is the fact that the comics medium is a visual one. The stories are told through pictures. Each story is made up of a certain number of pages, each page is made up of a certain number of panels and each panel holds one illustration. The captions, dialogue and so forth augment the picture in each panel, but it’s the pictures that are the primary storytelling element. Therefore, the stories have to be visually interesting, and since you, as writer, are going to be telling the artists what to draw, you have to plot your stories with that in mind.

The last sentence is true, but it doesn’t make up for the rest. I found it appalling that a writer like Busiek would give up on the importance of the text on the very first chapter of his writing guide.

Maybe I’ve read too much Prince Valiant when I was a kid, but I think text and image are equally important in comics. If the images are not beautiful, we won’t feel attracted to read the comic. Images are the first thing we absorb from it, and we take less than 1 second to decide whether an image is appealing to us or not. However, what verb do we use when we refer to comics? We don’t watch them like we watch television. We don’t listen to them, we don’t eat them, we don’t sniff them. We read comics.

The text is fundamental. Why are writers like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman so above the average? Is it simply because they have a lot of references and use their culture in favour of their storylines? Great writers are not engineers of plot, architects of narrative gimmicks that surprise us every few pages. Great writers write great text, and that is a very difficult craft, but an important one.

When I was a kid, I loved “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson. Later, as a teenager, I forgot about it, thinking that it was too “for kids” for a snob intellectual like I thought I wanted to be. Recently I read it again, and it was great. Why? Pirates and islands are nothing new, but the way Stevenson writes about them is just seductive. He is so careful about everything: the rhythm of the story, the way the words sound, the inner pacing of each sentence… After you start reading it, you can’t help but keep reading, and you feel want to read it out loud, because it’s so fun and interesting. The same story, told only with images, wouldn’t be as captivating.

So does that mean that great comics need great text? Not necessarily. For me, the beauty of comics is that the relationship between image and text is fluid. The line that divides them is very blurry and can easily be pushed around.

Let’s see if I can find some good examples.

A classic Valiant panel, with a big detailed drawing and narrative text on the side. An old style, where text merely jumps inside of the panel, without much interaction. But reading it is important, it's not just a poster or a pin-up. It's a story!

Flash Gordon was more balanced, mixing narrative boxes and balloons. It still "sounds" like a book, but now with dialogue, following the lead of talking movies.

Milton Caniff was a master of all things comics. In this example, a long speech, with a text so powerful that it was read out loud in a US Congress session.

In another example, a brilliant way to show the character's confusion and dreamlike state, with music lyrics flying around his head.

Contrast is always important and useful. Here we have an important piece of text, followed by a haunting silence--something you can't get in a book.

Sometimes Valentina doesn't say anything. We don't care much, really, but this page would look better hanging on your wall, on a tattoo, or on a t-shirt - not as a book page.

Comics poem by Aidan Koch.

Chris Ware is famous for his meticulous drawings, but his text is very good. Look how every little panel on this page has a small phrase, and they all sum up. The page is non-linear, meaning that you can read the panels from the left to the right, and from top to bottom, but with no "correct" sequence. Even so, the text works!

Well, I could show examples for the rest of my life, but I think I’ve made my point. Comics are not supposed to be either a visual or a written media: they thrive on the dialogue of both, sometimes favouring one, sometimes the other, building a specific type of narrative that cannot be matched by illustration or literature alone.