Here’s a weird and fun activity that we use to play around with the outer limits of the relationship between image and text.
The basic idea is that you give students a one page comic with all the dialogue and narration whited out of the balloons and boxes. They fill in text while deliberately disregarding any correspondence to the images–the goal is “nonsense”. Then each student compares his or her comic with the others and they collectively discuss which ones make the most sense when read as a comic and which, if any, can really be said to make no sense at all.
Here is the page that we use for this activity:
Jessica drew it taking as her source a page from the Italian master Magnus‘ comic, The Specialist: Full Moon in Dendera (Catalan Communications, alas, long out of print). We chose this particular page to adapt because it has a variety of situations and characters whose relationships are not immediately clear. (You can download a pdf here.)
Here are the instructions for the activity:
Try to let everyone finish but if there are some stragglers holding you back, just start the conversation. it’s not really a critique so much as a discussion and debate about how much “meaning” and narrative you can find in each of these pages, specifically as derived from the interation of text and image from panel to panel.
We usually start by pointing out a page that seems to us clearly in the wrong part of the continuum. For example, someone might put a list of art supplies in the balloons and just assume that the result is nonsense, but what we love about this activity is that when you break it down, panel by panel, more often than not you can find a clear dialogue and argument to the page.
Some of the things to look for are:
You don’t need to talk about every page, in fact you shouldn’t. We usually talk about 6-8, enough to let the idea (and its ambiguity) settle in. And all along encourage the students to question you (and, boy, some of them will!) and challenge your assertions. They are free to move stuff around or propose different readings of what’s going on in a given comic.
Here are a few examples of filled-in pages from past classes. Try printing them out and arranging them along a continuum and then ask a friend or classmate to consider your choices and see if she agrees. Alternately, you can open these pages in tabs and treat your browser window like the sense/nonsense spectrum by moving the tabs around.
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