The Poetry of Comics

I had never thought about comics as analogous to poetry before reading the article “Reading Comics,” by Carol Tilley. After the very first mention of poetry, though, where she compared the variation of panels to the poetic line breaks and punctuation, I saw how reading comics and reading poetry have so very much in common. Perhaps my analysis is too simplistic, and maybe some ideas are stretching the connection a bit much, but this is where my mind went!

First of all, you need either training or a lot of reflective experience to really understand them. I remember reading poetry for class in school; a lot of it seemed pretty dumb to me (much like many comics do). Some of it probably was (just like some comics likely are), but some of it I probably just didn’t have the training or experience to really understand, and I probably missed out on some insightful stuff because of it. I never took a class just on poetry, and the smattering of instruction I did have dealt mainly with conventions of poetry, not the language or art of it. There is probably common symbolism I have misunderstood, styles I rejected out of hand, methods I didn’t comprehend—things that have kept me from not only understanding the poem itself (or the poet who wrote it) but similar techniques and references in other forms of literature and media. Comics are much the same way. I never got into comics as a child (beyond the “funny pages” my grandmother saved for us out of her Sunday paper every week—which we read and then used for wrapping paper!), and, although I have become interested in graphic novels in particular through my youth literature classes, I still struggle to read them as fluently and with as deep of comprehension as I am able to do with other forms of writing. They look easy—simplistic—just pictures, just words—but they are not (at least, not the good ones).

Additionally, there are a variety of types, and just because you appreciate and understand one type doesn’t mean you like them all. I like haikus, rhyming verse (generally funny), and poetry about nature. I don’t like sappy poems, poems with unfamiliar rhythms, and poetry so vague that I think the author must have been on something. Then there are comics: Mary Worth, for example, or Rex Morgan, M.D. (both still going!-- http://www.seattlepi.com/fun/comic.asp?feature_id=Mary_Worth, http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/rmorgan/about.htm). Weekly comic strips that were, frankly, soap operas. I hated them. They were boring. And I only read them if I ran out of cereal boxes and shampoo labels and –really- needed something to read. The colors were dull, the people were too realistic, the storylines unbearably slow to unfold, and, frankly, not funny. Not at all. That’s what I liked in comics at the time, although now I’ve branched out to appreciate clever comics and graphic novels about a variety of topics (but mostly history with which I’m already familiar—The Murder of Abraham Lincoln, for example—and current issues—like Persepolis and American Born Chinese). I liked The Far Side, Garfield, Zits…and now Baby Blues and Unshelved. The art is different, the contents are different—but so am I. My tastes have changed not only as I have aged and have new experiences but also as I have been exposed to and taught about what is available out there. I still have comics and graphic novels I don’t like, but I am now able to read them and (usually) understand what’s going on!

Finally, there is the comparison between different devices they each use. Like the article said, poetry has line breaks and punctuation where comics have a variety of panels. Comics have frames where poems have stanzas. Where poems use imagery to produce visuals that aren’t there, comics have gutters. Balloons show character’s thoughts and speech in comics, and poems often use different punctuation or fonts to signify those words. In a poem, you may have to pay attention to verb tense or point-of-view to decide if the narrator is interjecting, and comics have narrative boxes for information not contained in the dialog. Just like comics, poetry often also uses typography to enhance a mood or convey an idea, most specifically in concrete poetry. (But can you imagine the difference between a love poem printed in soft, curvy script and the same one printed in bold, angular letters?) A comic has motion lines, and poetry uses line breaks and page placement to convey motion. Where a comic might use emanata (some of her examples were the light bulb or the anger cloud), poems use imagery again--this time in the form of language about color, rhyming, assonance, or alliteration—to give us ideas about the characters. And, of course, there are style differences within the form that create different feels and looks and appeal to different people.

So, comics are like poetry. Who would have thought?