For someone who loves TV shows based off of graphic novels I had never read one until this class. I quickly learned it’s a whole new level of literacy. My prior experience with comics had been limited to the Sunday comics in the newspaper I use to read at my grandparents house growing up.
I found this link which was able to sum up my feelings on reading graphic novels, and how on first read it’s easy just to read only text.
There’s a saying a picture is worth a thousand words, and graphic novels are able to exemplify that concept. When reading “A contract with God”, I soon discovered how much of the story I would be missing if I didn’t ‘read’ the pictures as I was doing with words. What I found interesting that when a comic panel is trying to portray a hectic seen or confusion it does so much better than a traditional novel. I believe this is because a novel is read in a tradition linear fashion but with a comic on a panel like this one….
It can be read linear or out of order and it still makes sense.
Graphic novels have found a medium between the visual and written word when it com es to telling a story, allowing more to left to imagination of the reader than that would be seen on other platforms– whether it being strictly visual or written.