Pictures vs Words

                Throughout this week, we have stepped away from our typical passages to analyze Maus, a graphic novel. As we have continued to read it, I realized just how mistaken a lot of people are about comics. Many tend to believe that comics are meant for a younger audience, a possible reason being that images are associated with picture books whereas books filled with text visually appear more educational because they resemble textbooks. Maus proves this wrong. It is heavy with illustrations, yet the book is aimed towards adults since the topic revolves around the tragedy of the Holocaust. The images were powerful and held underlying meanings that also worked with text to create the story.

As Scott McCloud stated in Show and Tell, “words and pictures have great powers to tell stories when creators fully exploit them both”, which has thoughtfully been done in the graphic novel that we are reading.  Sometimes the images were much more prominent, like in pages 157 and 147, where the illustrations dominated the page and ultimately proved that pictures are worth a thousand words. The pictures seemed to hold more of a deeper meaning than the words. They alone could tell a story that words could not. Now, I’m not saying that words are meaningless or not as important as pictures. Comics would not be comics without the help of words, even if there isn’t a lot of them. Perhaps one image could tell a story, but a story could not be told as adequately if it weren’t for words to bring the story together and create a sense of organization.