Words and Images

Many people had wondered why and how graphic novel can be considered as art or design. What they don’t know is how word and image work together to incorporate the message or the main point of the story to the reader. For example Brian Fies, the author of Mom’s CancerWhatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow, and stress out this idea to give readers the feeling of what the characters are going through as the story progresses.

 

The image below from Fies’ comic Mom’s Cancer gives a demonstration of this idea. Fies’ comic is about his mother’s battle against cancer and the image above demonstrate a stage of what his mother was going through. The words in the panel explain the process and things his mother needs to go through and needs to do. Then in the panel each picture demonstrates a metaphor of how his mother really feels like, it’s to express and exaggerate the idea of the process to give the readers a better idea of how it really feels to be in his mother’s shoes. Although the words and pictures and the words are totally different from one another they both portray the same main idea of how it feels like to battle against cancer.