Text - Rhodes University

The lure of comics for visual artists might be perceived as an attempt to escape the
exposure of visual art by hiding behind words, a foreign element in pictures that can
screen the artist by reintroducing the buffer of external content. Visual literacy requires,
at least in lay readers, more apparently unconcious skills than verbal literacy, as visual
literacy is not taught formally. Thus a purely visual story seems to act more directly on
the understanding without rational analysis.
A possible reason for venturing into comics is that comics are a way to draw peers'
interest into ones' work. Most of these artists were fine art students at universities, where
peer groups consist largely of non-art students. Art students work in isolation, and their
work is often separate from the rest of their daily lives; friends look at pictures or
sculptures and exclaim kindly, but are not trained in the language of appreciation, and
little real understanding occurs. The artists are confronted with the problem of a
separation of languages. While their friends may be able to recognise "good" art, usually
because they are in some degree visually and artistically literate and educated, they are
seldom struck by a sense of relevance or immediacy. This is especially true of students
at the beginning of their studies, where most of the work is of necessity of a training
nature, being exercises in drawing and techniques. There is a need to produce something
that is real to their peers; also, because students are most likely to share the values and
beliefs of their peers rather than those of their teachers, there is an underlying need to
produce something that is more real to themselves, and is read more directly, more
instinctively by others.
Of course, these "instinctive" reactions to a work are a product of familiarity. But the
students' world of reality is more media oriented than that of their teachers; especially
in South Africa, with the late arrival of television, the generation of comic artists under
discussion were among the first generation of South Africans to grow up with television,
155