A Picture is Worth 1000 Words.

After finally finishing Persepolis and ultimately seeing Marji escape a possibly horrible execution in Iran, I had felt like I had just finished a 300 page book. An everyday book with text on every page. But shouldn't this feel different? I mean this book is under 200 pages and littered with photographs. Shouldn't I feel as if I had just finished a book of Calvin and Hobbes? I mean sure, they are complete polar opposites in that Calvin and Hobbes is a humorous comic and Persepolis is a fairly dark comic. But they are just that. Comics. Or that is what conventional wisdom would tell you, at least.

This just shows you how comics are purely a medium of writing. They are not a genre as many people come to understand. If fact just the other day a friend of mine asked to see what book I was reading. In response I showed him Persepolis  and was fairly surprised to have him respond by saying “why are you reading a graphic novel in AP lang. As if somehow the class should be above this medium.

In fact, in just my last blog I described the effectiveness of comics at getting information across, however this time I want to present it with some evidence. To prove my point I went to Wikipedia and then to the summary section for two books: The Kite Runner and Persepolis. Both are books with similar themes and plots. And both delve into fairly dark themes. And when I scrolled down to the plot summary section, even I was somewhat surprised. The Kite Runner had a fairly lengthy summary, around maybe 3/4 of a page. This was to be expected.

What surprised me though is that Persepolis, the comic had a summary twice as long. Incredible. This being a book which has maybe 1/1000th the text that Persepolis contains and yet it took longer to summarize Persepolis.

Clearly this shows the depth to which the combination of visuals and texts can display information. It is almost as if there is a multiplication sign in between the text and accompanying visual. If there are 10 words by a frame, then clearly the picture is a multiplication factor of 100, leaving a value of 1000.