Graphic Narratives as Teaching Tools

Graphic Narrative

In my growing up experience, comic book readers would either proudly display what they were currently reading or shyly hide it away, possibly as it was thought of by some, including teachers, as not serious reading. It was viewed as a kind of “fake” reading, since you really could just look at the pictures and not bother with the dialogue. I was not a comic book reader but was intrigued by those who were. In hindsight, I think it was an overstimulating medium for me, not knowing where to look first for dialogue, which panel came next, bright and bold colors jumping off the page. It actually seemed like a lot of work to get through a comic book. Despite my hesitation with the comic books themselves, every weekend I looked forward to the delivery of the Sunday newspaper and to being the first to grab the color comics – a full section of that day’s paper. Much more exciting than the short comic strips in the daily paper, which were almost always in black and white and generally had fewer panels than Sunday’s versions. There was also the idea that some comic strips are rather stand-alone stories and episodes, and others are serial – you must know what happened last Sunday (or even throughout the week) to understand the new part of the story or any new characters. That seemed more work than I was interested in investing in as a child. So, my attention was on Peanuts, Donald Duck, Marmaduke, Hi and Lois, Calvin and Hobbes, Beetle Bailey – all very simple and funny comic strips. I wasn’t as interested in Dick Tracy or Flash Gordon. They seemed so much more intense and obtuse to me. The artwork was not as straightforward, and understanding the storyline required having all the background information for it to make sense. The characters were drawn more realistically and seemed more intense than the silly, funny characters in the comics that drew my attention. 

All these components that intrigued and interested me – artistic choices, panel design, use of dialogue or not – are fundamental to the graphic narrative reading experience. The terms graphic narrative, graphic novel, and comic are often used interchangeably.

As mentioned before, over time, they have had a reputation for not being genuine reading, but merely brightly colored images in panels telling simple stories about superheroes.

The variety of art and design could draw your attention quickly and entice you to move your eyes around quickly to scan the entire page in front of you. As Scott McCloud says in Understanding Comics, the genre is really defined too narrowly and, in actuality, is quite varied.  One way to think about comics is that the word refers to the medium itself, not a specific object, such as a comic book or comic strip.⁵ Comics are presented as sequential art intended to convey a message and produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.⁶ Stories have been told through pictures that date back to cave paintings and drawings that depict life at that time, a form of picture manuscripts ⁷ Whether drawn as a realistic image, almost resembling a photograph, or simply as a circle with a line (smile) and two dots (eyes), we interpret each image as a face.⁸

Speech Balloons

The Pigeon stories and Elephant and Piggie series are told through the voice of the characters themselves. To show their range of emotions throughout each book, Mo Willems uses speech bubbles of various shapes and sizes to help the reader follow Pigeon’s, Elephant’s, and Piggie’s thoughts and feelings. Comics and graphic novels use this approach or convention in place of a straight narrative or prose. A formal distinction is often made between the balloon that indicates speech and the one that indicates thoughts.

The most common is the speech bubble. As its name indicates, the bubble shows that the character is talking out loud. It is used in two forms for two circumstances: an in-panel character and an off-panel character. An in-panel character (one who is fully or mostly visible in the panel of the strip of comic that the reader sees) uses a bubble with a pointer, called a tail, directed towards that speaker.

When one character has multiple balloons within a panel, generally only the balloon nearest to the speaker's head has a tail, and the others are connected to it in sequence by narrow bands. 

An off-panel character (the comic book version of being "off screen") has an obvious format with the standard speech bubble with a tail pointing toward the speaker's position, which is somewhere out of the reader’s view. In manga, the tail points into the bubble, instead of out. And a third design replaces the tail with a sort of bottleneck that connects with the side of the panel. All three show “talking” from a character outside of the panel or page.

The most universal symbol for thinking in a graphic narrative is called the chain thought bubble. It consists of a large, cloud-like bubble containing the text of the thought, with a chain of increasingly smaller circular bubbles leading to the character. Some artists use an elliptical bubble instead of a cloud-shaped one. Sometimes, non-human characters such as Snoopy and Garfield "talk" using thought bubbles. They may also be used in circumstances when a character is gagged or otherwise unable to speak.

Figure 1: The four most common speech balloons, left to right: speech whisper, thought, scream

The shape of a speech balloon can be used to convey further information. Broadcast bubbles may have a jagged tail, like the conventional drawing of a lightning flash, and either a squared-off or jagged outline. Icicle bubbles have jagged "icicles" on the lower edge, representing "cold" hostility. Although they are not in the Pigeon books, monster bubbles show blood or slime dripping from them. Colored bubbles can be used to show the emotion that goes with the speech, such as red for anger or green for envy. 

Captions are another way to show text and are generally used for narration purposes, such as showing location and time, or some sort of editorial commentary. They are usually rectangular and near the edge of a panel. They may be a different color to indicate that they are separate from the word balloons used by the characters, which are generally white. Captions may also share an internal dialogue occurring.