I was excited to see that our syllabus included a graphic novel. Comic books were some of the first things I ever read as a child, and are something I’ve continued to read as an adult. While I’m the first to admit that they’re not all high literature, there are very real merits to the form that often get overlooked when the form is dismissed as “for kids”. Nat Turner is proof that not all comics are appropriate for children, and I can personally attest that it’s hardly an outlier in that respect. We think of any book with pictures as a ‘picture-book’, and picture-books are typically seen as appropriate for children. This always struck me as a strange way to think about books: at some point in a child’s life, books with pictures stop being seen as worthy of their attention. How did we get to that idea as a society? We love and appreciate art when it’s hung on the wall, but if it’s in a book with text, it’s not considered art anymore?
Scott McCloud‘s Understanding Comics honestly changed the way I read comics when I first encountered it more than ten years ago. While I already ‘knew’ how to read comics from growing up on them, I had never really thought about how to read them; it was a form of literacy that I had learned through exposure, the same way I had learned English. Nobody had to teach me how to read comics, so I had never really thought about the process. McCloud’s explanations of the mechanics of time and the complex interaction between image and text within the graphic novel format made me pay much closer attention to the way artists choose to lay out the series of images on a page with respect to the narrative process. I’m much more aware now when I come across a well-arranged or innovative layout of panels. Of course, the same is true of poor page layouts; sometimes it’s just not obvious what order the panels are meant to be read in, and that’s a failure of the artist to thoroughly consider the page as a whole and as a narrative/chronological space.