Memory, Experience, and Comics Comprehension

In my last post, I discussed some traits of this quote by Chris Ware found from this blog post

“I don't like to think of my work as 'cinematic.' A movie is passive -- you're watching it, taking it in. Where a comic strip, it's completely active: you have to read it, search it for meaning, for the connection with your entire experience and your memory. Yes, you do have the illusion of watching something happen in a comic strip -- but if it's done well, it comes alive on the page like a novel. A novel is the most interactive thing ever created.”

The other thing I find interesting about this quite is that I have a hard time believing that people "imagine" things while reading comics that connect with their "entire experience" and "memory." There are two things that this quote implies:

1) That people are converting their reading experience into consciously clear interpretations (imagery, sounds, etc) while reading a comic (a notion that echoes McCloud's Closure).

2) That people's creation of meaning is entirely based on experience ("Empiricism").

Concerning the first point, I know when I read a comic, I don't necessarily feel like I "fill in" any missing imagery with mental imagery of my own. I don't visualize anything that isn't in the pages. I do understand it, and make the mental connections between and across images/words, but there is no additional imagery added. Novels do create this imagery (for some but not all people) because it isn't provided already.

This blog post has replied to my earlier posting expressing that Ware's meaning of "active" comprehension relates to this sort of filling in of sensory information that's missing. Again, I am hesitant to accept that people are actually imagining sounds, smells, motion, etc. while reading a comic.

Novels certainly allow people to create visual imagery — but vision is our primary sensory modality, so I find it unsurprising that this would happen. I'm less confident about the other senses.

SO....If you actually do feel like you create mental imagery while reading comics, I want to hear about it in the comments please!

On the second point, there is quite a lot of evidence that our understanding of meaning does not necessarily come from experience (and certainly not conscious experience). That's not to say all of it is innate, but there's a give and take between innate meaning and acquired meaning — the debate is over the percentages.

What I'd be more confident stating though is that when reading a comic, I doubt people are actively referencing overt memories or experiences in order to comprehend a sequence. Rather, they are drawing upon their abstract concepts — just like when they read a book, or yes, see a movie.

"Visual literacy"

The phrase "visual literacy" is one that is often bandied about these days, and has begun to grate on my nerves a bit — if only because it is a bit vague and vacuous in meaning. The phrase at this point is basically being used to mean a familiarity with anything that is an image and (usually) not text.

However, what kind of "literacy" is this exactly? The range of things covered by this term include vastly disparate material: diagrams, paintings, graphs, websites, comics, etc.

Not all of these items are processed in a similar way, and "literacy" for one does not necessarily equate with "literacy" for another. For example, I know people who are highly fluent in reading the visual language of comics, yet find "infographics" like flow charts mind-numbingly opaque (and vice-versa).

Such a phrase implies 1) that visual communication and expression is homogenous, and any diversity is washed over by its shared virtue of being "visual", and 2) that comprehension of one of these forms equates to or leads to equal understanding of the others.

This seems far from the case. The various things that are covered by this term have very different motivating structures and properties, and comprehension with one does not necessarily lead to the same skills with others (and especially does not imply that for production). Really, what we have is a number of disparate forms that each involve their own forms of fluency independently, despite a shared visual modality.

The implication that such diversity is homogenous is a kind of orientalism — likely just a view embodied from a culture entrenched in a verbal modality that is still grasping at a method of communication that it doesn't yet fully embrace or understand.