Dear David, Lubomir, Terry, Katherine, and all,
David, to respond to some of your speculations about comics, I would say there is no requirement for a comic to have minimalist and highly stylised drawing. Many do of course, and economy of effort is one reason for this, but there are many examples of highly detailed comics. Photoroman-style comics featured heavily in mainstream anthologies in Europe for decades, and there are examples of maximalist comics, such as Geoff Darrow’s work, or Jean-Christophe Thibert’s.
I guess it depends on what you mean by minimalist, but a minimalist drawing does not automatically lead to ‘multiple inventions’ by the reader. You could say that IKEA instructions are a kind of comic that feature minimalist drawings (removal of background setting, reduction of impertinent detail). These comics are not designed to be open to interpretation.
Comics can be open to interpretation to be sure but they don’t have to be. In the same way that writing can deliberately invite different interpretations or be clear and precise (a sonnet is not the same as the iTunes Service Agreement), a comic can be made deliberately open to interpretation or it can be made to be very precise as to its meaning. Airline safety cards are different comics to the visual poetics of Lorenzo Mattotti’s “Fires”.
The legal comics are designed to reduce interpretation, specifically the kind of interpretation that leads to legal disputes.
Pictures are not inherently more vague than words. Your example of the Hitchhiker’s Guide radio play demonstrates that the words alone allowed interpretation that evaporated when pictures were added.
Stuart
On 1/5/19, 5:31 am, "PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in on behalf of David Sless" <[log in to unmask] on behalf of [log in to unmask]> wrote:
—snip—
Douglas Adams, when asked which version the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy he preferred—the radio, book, television or film—said he preferred the radio version because the sets were better. The radio allowed the listener the freedom to invent their own.
It seems to me that the comic strip genre allows this opportunity for creative invention. The minimalist and highly stylised drawing and the gaps between each picture provide readers with the opportunity for multiple inventions at each point. I wonder if some readers who are challenged by reading text might skip through and glean the narrative purely by interpreting the sequence of pictures, enjoying the opportunity to invent their own interpretation of the narrative. This is further enhanced by the informality that is often pervasive in the comic strip: it’s accessible to all because of its informality.
This is exactly the opposite of a legal document where the attempt is made to have no informality and no multiple interpretations subject to the whim of the reader. Both Lubomir and Terry both give some insight into this in the questions they raise.
—snip—
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