Text - Rhodes University

In previous comics, my 'visual writing' lessened the possibility of creating a visual reality,
because the reader was constantly reminded of the page, the writing and the drawing.
Much of the meaning of the cornie was explicitly contained in the layout; here, the story
is implicit, and cornie devices are used more unobtrusively, in order to narrate a story.
The story itself is important, not how it is told.
The narrative is divided internally into episodes, which are matched visually by clusters
of frames. Page 3 of the cornie [fig 33] is one of these episodes. Despite the frames' close
proximity to each other, there is movement from each to each. The variation of black and
white grounds supports the changes in tone and pace in the text, separating each moment
from the next. Sequentialism is in part created by the repetition of identically shaped
frames, which are not separated by text. Lettering style remains the same throughout;
thus the lettering becomes, in a way, invisible. It is read for its sense, rather than its
visual qualities, and does not become intrusive, or fragment the comic. Visual continuity
between frames is achieved through the repetition of elements from one frame to the
next.
The script's episodic structure, it's way of focussing on only one thing at a time, matches
the claustrophobic atmosphere of the pictures, an atmosphere achieved through a kind
of decorative simplification.
In Who Needs Misery? I again avoid the problem of integrating text boxes and pictures
by resorting only to spoken and thought text. The story contains as much introspection
as something like Last Week, but is presented from the outside. Instead of an expression
of a narrator's state of mind, it is a narration of a character's state of mind. The comic
is about differing perceptions of reality, about isolation and intrusion.
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