Image: the obvious thing common to poetry and comics p1

BATMAN AND NERUDA

So poems and comics are stories. Let’s think such nonsense is right. Consequently, Batman has a connection to Pablo Neruda… And Picasso! Yeah, jokes come out from me whenever I don’t need them. However, Batman is really related to Neruda in a way that might seem too obvious to think it from any angle.

Pablo Neruda wrote poetry. Poems are images. So are comics.

 No matter how much does Superman beat Doomsday again and again; any comic is just a lines, dots and shadows’ collection we decode as an image. Yes, an image similar to a moment frozen in time by a photograph but still an IMAGE. Yes, it might give you the illusion of movement through the vignettes. But a comic is a group (somehow this reminds me of the definition of a mathematical set) of images.   

And, independently if printed or not; nowadays the natural media for poetry or comics might not anymore be the cellulose threads glued into a bunch plastered by chalks; both are still images.

Ehh….

ARE LETTERS IMAGES?

Yep, kimosabi. So much a letter is an image that I bet; you have not even stopped to think how the people who can read with their hands, experience poetry in a different way. For them, a comic and a poem are totally different experiences. I’m sure they must have interesting ideas about narrative. And silence. Given the fact they listen to it in ways we don’t or, don’t listen to it but FEEL IT.  

IMAGE. An image can be unique, repeated, fragmented, cut out or to be one slide in a sequence —I’ll chamber you up in blood later talking about sequences. In any of such ways WE NEED A PREREQUIREMENT to be able to read poems and comics. Literacy¹.

You may write a simple message in a post-it without going any further in anything else than simple reading and writing. It communicates². It is the same with sticks and circles or even really detailed drawings made up to deliver simple messages. Both versions are more or less proficient depending on situation. Visual literacy, in the way of making and understanding visual messages the same way one can understand a poem; requires a certain degree of cramming —disregarding that some of us study the comic pretending to read the text book….

TO BE CONTINUED

1. A primer of visual literacy. Donis A. Dondis. ↩︎
2. Sometimes. No don’t discuss that communication happens all the time, language involved. Communication is overrated as a derivate from language. ↩︎