Why are comics and poems alike? Visual input p1

<<The inclination toward wanting to connect the verbal and visual structure is totally understandable. One of the reasons is natural. Visual data has three distinctive and individual levels: the visual input which consists of myriad symbol systems; the representational visual material we recognize in the environment and can replicate in drawing, painting, sculpture, and film; and the abstract understructure, the form of everything we see, whether natural or composed for intended effects>>

A primer of visual literacy. 1973, MIT press. Donis A. Dondis. Pag. 27-28. Op cit.

SENSITIVE

A poem is a close cousin to comic based on the sole fact that both, start by being an input. Visual or not, both require a sensorial perception that inputs information into the brain: fingers feeling little embossed dots, alphabets that require sight, lines that require eyes. Yes, I’m to force a little things. Let’s say those embossed dots are images. If there something as the image of spatial disruption in the gray matter of a blind¹ person because, in spite of my own myopia magna, I can still see.  

Voila, zeroth law. We’ve discovered the very beginning for everything.

LITERATURE AND COMICS START both WITH SIGHT. And that’s nothing new.

VISUALLY REPRESENTATIVE MATERIAL

Sometime I had a whole entry based upon something Graham Dunstan Martin stated in Catchfire. If you may cause you have no idea what I’m speaking about, this is the entry…in Spanish. Unfortunately, I have had no access to any English version of the book to try and quote it as it was originally written. Una disquisición sobre la brujería aplicada.  

Making it short; Dunstan Martin says magic works better in a “spellcast” language, for IT has to summon back taste, sense and image. Our mother tongue is nothing more than tossing coins into a counter. We use the word “butter” without tasting its salt, its grease, its calories. Nothing but a mere exchange of abstract ideas. However, take a language you don’t use (in the book the spell language hasn’t been really invented tough it has a brush of Latin) and you will be forced to remember everything there is to that being evoked. Such is magic.

TO BE CONTINUED

1. Blindness understood as any physical affection impairing the optical nerves, pupils or corneas and that; only so I won’t be naming each and every lack in perception ability existing in the world. A response to light, to summarize. And no, I won’t discuss the term to sugarcoat it into something inclusive just to behave derisingly and discriminative towards people who can’t or have difficulties to see and exclude them from this ideas I’ve been nonsensing about. ↩︎