The Tyranny of Words

In my previous post I had used the phrase "the tyranny of words" to describe how, even in a visual-centric medium such as comics, we as readers can tend to pay more attention (or even complete attention) to the words used in a comic or graphic narrative than to the images used to convey the story. Sometimes, those who create comics can also fall in love with their words, and consequently create a strip that's, well, not very good.

Yesterday, I came across this strip that I think demonstrates well how NOT to compose a comic strip. This is from a long-time strip called Funky Winkerbean, a strip that has been around for almost 50 years. (My criticism for this strip is strictly for this particular strip, and not the entire history of the strip.)

 

We can tell by the configuration of the word balloons that what's being represented is four or five separate pieces of dialogue, which means what we have here is something that could be rendered as a 4- or 5-panel strip, rather than one vertical one.  The line-skip between each word balloon acts as a gutter, which means we expect something to change visually as we move from one panel to the next.  But ... nothing changes.  We have one image, and that's it.  We could say that the unintended message is that the artist was too lazy or uninterested to bother drawing three or four more panels.

This also immediately creates problems with the time frame (to use McCloud's term) in the strip.  We have one static image, and about 5 pieces of dialogue that we know would have to unfold over time.  We usually can work with that in comic strips--writers commonly have dialogue that's a bit longer than what's being depicted in the frame--but here it's excessively long, too long for a single image.   That means that certain pieces of dialogue don't match up with what's being depicted visually, and in comics that can be a serious problem.  Below I've rearranged the strip into what it would look like as a 4-panel sequence, so you can perhaps see better the problem of a single, static image used for a sequence that occurs over time.  If nothing else, the characters listening to this monologue come across as people who've died of boredom listening to this self-righteous jackass.

And because of the layout, the dialogue begins in some kind of black space. So, like, does this take place at night in a house that has no roof?

Finally, and the most obvious issue, is that the panel is simply physically dominated by words.  Roughly it looks like about two-thirds of the frame is filled with words, and basically squeezing the characters like apples in a cider press.  This is supposed to be a primarily visual medium, not an essay.