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  • Picture Book Guy Looks at Comics:Structural Differences in Two Kinds of Visual Narrative
  • Perry Nodelman (bio)

But Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills, you're from two different worlds.

The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy

I am a picture book guy—the author of Words about Pictures, a theoretical text about how picture books for children communicate. It is with some embarrassment, then, that I admit to having trouble making sense of a related form of storytelling with pictures: comics. Approaching comics with the meaning-making strategies I have derived from my experience of picture books is something like lacking gills; I find myself confused about how to fit together the various kinds of verbal and visual information comics typically provide in order to grasp the stories they are trying to tell. With persistence, I can make sense of how comics construct stories; but the kinds of confusions I experience before I get there might be a useful source of information about how the formal qualities conventional in these two kinds of visual narrative, picture books and comics, differ.

When I speak of conventional formal qualities, I mean the most basic structural characteristics of these two different kinds of storytelling by means of words and pictures—the fact that comics tend to report what characters say in speech balloons, for instance, or that picture books tend to provide just one large picture for each page or spread as opposed to the many different panels usually in view on each spread of a comics story. I know that, as in Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen, some picture books make use of speech balloons and other structural conventions more commonly found in comics. I know that comics do occasionally resort to pages consisting of just one large panel, and that they sometimes rely on other picture/text relationships more common in picture books. But that I can so easily identify the speech balloons as being comics-like [End Page 436] visitors in picture books, and the single-panel pages as picture book-like visitors in comics, reveals their status as conventions of their specific form of graphic storytelling—and it is the basic conventions typically identifying a text as either a comic or picture book that I propose to focus on here.

While exploring those differences, I will offer examples of my generalizations about structural conventions from two texts with illustrations by the Canadian artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas: his own graphic novel, Red (2009), which he identifies as a "Haida manga," and Amanda Reid-Stevens's picture book, The Canoe He Called Loo Taas (2010). In Red, Yahgulanaas tells a story of the life of a Haida hero before European contact. Loo Taas is about a fifteen-meter war canoe carved by Bill Reid for Expo 86 in Vancouver, and now housed at the Haida Heritage Centre on Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands), British Columbia. While the illustrations in the two books are similar in style, both being representational but simplified cartoons and both making reference to traditional Haida art, the books offer substantially different reading experiences. And while both exhibit significant divergence from the mainstream conventions of the kinds of books they represent—Red in its use of curvaceous frame borders that evoke Haida form-lines, Loo Taas in being a nonfictional but poetic celebration of a specific actual artifact—I believe that each nevertheless manifests the distinguishing structural characteristics of its type. Indeed, the distinctiveness of these books might be understood in terms of how each takes the inherent structural characteristics of its type, either comic or picture book, toward a logical extreme.

The most obvious way the two books differ from each other is what leads to my confusion as a picture book guy looking at comics. Put baldly: in terms of structure, comics are more complicated than picture books. This is not to say that some picture books are not structurally complicated or some comics structurally simple, or that some picture books do not have a more complex structure than some comics. But conventionally, as in Loo Taas, each spread of a picture book contains one or two images and one or...

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