I’ve been messing around with different ways to approach comics. Let me know what you think…

When it comes to selecting books for your library or classroom, you may be hesitant to approach graphic novels out of a lack of familiarity with the medium. Pages packed with visual information may appear chaotic and confusing, and informational sources may assume that you are already a fan.

There is no need to be intimidated! Graphic novels are accessible on a number of levels and need only a discerning eye and a little practice to be understood.

When it comes down to it, the best way to understand comics and graphic novels is to read them. Examine the structure and mechanics of a single page and you’ll discover a treasure trove of information that rewards multiple modes of reading. By paying attention to how this information is organized and presented, you can strengthen your own reading and observation skills!

There are actually several ways to read a graphic novel page, which is why new readers can sometimes find them intimidating or confusing. Some readers choose to focus on the text, reading the story as they would prose and letting the images work on a subconscious level.

Others will pay attention primarily to the pictures, understanding the story by what is shown more than by what is told. These readers allow their imaginations to fill in the gaps between pictures and make a narrative out of them.

Ideally, you’ll glean the most from a comic both by reading and looking. A good exercise to strengthen both skills is to examine one page several times, breaking it down into separate parts.

Let’s start with this page from GT Lab’s Dignifying Science: Stories about Women Scientists. (c) Jim Ottaviani and Stephanie Gladden, Courtesy G.T. Labs. Click on image to enlarge it.

To put this page in context, it appears in a story about Rosalind Franklin, an English biophysicist whose work on X-Ray diffraction images of DNA was instrumental to Francis Crick and Jim Watson’s famous hypothesis on the structure of DNA, published in 1953. In the sequence before this page, Franklin and Raymond Gosling (the man in the glasses) are studying images created from wet and dry samples of DNA. Gosling has suggested they take a break for some tea at the lounge, forgetting that Franklin would not be welcome in the Boy’s Club atmosphere. They part ways and this page shows Franklin preparing the lecture that will inspire Jim Watson.

• What do you learn from reading just the boxes of text and dialogue balloons, without looking at the pictures?
• What if you block out all the text and only look at the pictures? Can you verbally describe what is happening?
• Now put them back together and look for connections and disparities between the pictures and the text. When do the pictures illustrate the words, and when do the words clarify the pictures? Does the combination of what is shown and what is told change the meaning of each individually? Can you spot any visual puns?

What does this picture tell you about what Raymond Gosling is thinking?

Even without understanding the text, you can see that serious work is being done. Look at Franklin’s determined expression in the last panel, the amount of space taken up by the text she is producing and the motion lines around her pen. Also notice the illustration on the chalk board behind her, which can be considered the visual manifestation of her studies - and thus no accident that it appears right next to her head.

Why might Ottaviani and Gladden choose to show Gosling and Franklin’s separate activities on the same page? What does this tell you about the conditions Franklin worked under?

Do the words and images ever contradict each other? If so, which seems to be telling the true story, and why? This could also serve as an introduction to identifying unreliable narrators in prose.

Now to mix it up: try to look at the text, rather than reading it. What does the size and style of the lettering tell you about what is being said? Pay particular attention to sound effects. Since comics are a silent medium, all noise must be rendered visually. How is this achieved?

This may be tricky at first, but you can also “read” the pictures, separating different thoughts and ideas as you would in prose. It is possible to construct a sort of grammar out of the layout and individual panels of a page. What is communicated by each panel individually? What about a row of panels? What about an entire page? There are no exact rules, but you can often think about the arrangement of images in terms of sentences, paragraphs and chapters.

For a much more in depth approach on the combination of reading and looking required by comics, I highly recommend reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud and Drawing Words and Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden.

Once you are comfortable reading and understanding graphic novels, you will also be able to develop a confident critical approach. What does the author succeed in communicating? How might they have done it better, or differently?

Graphic Novels can be an absorbing read, pulling you into a world that you both see and imagine at the same time. A singularly compelling story may make you forget that you are reading at all, which is one of the reasons that graphic novels are successful with normally reluctant readers. But without denying the pleasure of that particular reading experience, you may also find that slowing down and focusing on how you understand graphic novels will yield surprising insights and a more confident approach to both art and literature.