Back to Comics and Picture Books

The latest Notes from The Horn Book newsletter contains this exchange from editor Roger Sutton's interview with Françoise Mouly on the debut of the first TOON books--comics for beginning readers.

2. What’s the difference between a comic book and a picture book?

Both have pictures, but the similarities end there. Comic books offer a visual narrative, with words as only one of the elements intertwined with the pictures. The visual narrative in a comic book helps kids crack the code of literacy, teaching them how to read from left to right, from top to bottom. Speech balloons facilitate a child’s understanding of written dialogue as a transcription of spoken language. In a sense, comics are similar to face-to-face interaction. Comics blend words, images, and facial expressions with panel-to-panel progression, sound effects, and even shifts in type size to engage readers and propel the story. Many of the issues that emerging readers have traditionally struggled with are instantly clarified by comics’ simple and inviting format.

I don't fully agree with some of Mouly's statements, but heartily concur with others. The quibbles:

• Both picture book and comics forms have pictures in sequence. (In fact, "sequential art" was one of Will Eisner's "will you respect us now?" attempts to relabel comics. Unlike his "graphic novel," it doesn't seem to have leaped the fence from the comics field to the larger world.) Neither form is simply a collection of pictures; the sequential images make it possible to tell stories.
  
• Both forms usually have pictures and words. There are wordless picture books and wordless comics, of course, but those are the exceptions. (We don't have to say "wordful picture book" or "worded comic.")
  
• Some of the elements of comics that Mouly highlights are also elements of picture books:
  • Left/right (at least in our culture), top/bottom progression.
  • "Words, images, and facial expressions."
  • Digital layout and typography have made it possible for picture books also to use "shifts in type size," as well as:
    • shifts in type color.
    • shifts in type placement.
    • okay, I didn't really need this list, but I wanted to see what would happen if I kept adding new layers of bullet points.

As the key features that differentiate comics from picture books, I emphasize the number of pictures on a page spread and the way comics "show the invisible" through speech balloons, sound effects, and some other elements Mouly doesn't mention, such as the motion and emotion lines in this sample from TOON Books's Benny & Penny in Just Pretend, by Geoffrey Hayes.

I think those ingredients could indeed lead to comics being easier for some beginning readers to understand. The left/right, top/down progression that appears in both book forms is more apparent when a child can see several sequential images at once. The speech balloons' little tails provide a non-verbal link from characters to their dialog for someone who already has enough work to do puzzling out that dialog.

On the other hand, when children hear stories from their parents, what they hear is more like prose than like comics. In telling tales, we can rarely point to different people to indicate who said what; instead, we use verbal dialog tags like "he said." We describe events and actions rather than act them out. So for some children, a traditional prose picture book might be an easier transition from hearing to reading.

Of course, there's no reason for families to choose one form or the other.