text only comic:
image-driven poem:
Sugar hisses out of the rag-torn envelopes.
As I toss them toward the trash, two fall like whirligigs to the floor--
Or white leaves with red and blue text for veins: "sweetn-o".
My hand hesitates, for what if there are slugs underneath?
image-avoiding poem:
I like my tea like I like candy:
all bad-for-you and poisoned up.
Because coffee makes me jittery, I need something else to keep me awake.
I was a barista for five years.
I've long since sworn off that kind of labor and the tasks associated with it,
so when I miss the trash and drop the empty sugar packets on the floor,
Do I really have to pick the damned things up?
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Funny: I am especially fond of the image-only comic and the image-avoiding poem! I think this perhaps says more about ME than about the need for images in poems and text in comics, but we'll see!
ReplyDeleteOne thing I like about the "image-only" comic is that it does in fact incorporate text, or the suggestion of text, on the sweetener packet in the last frame. There's something that feels resolved, though in a lovely, open-ended way, about that text-image as the last moment: I think the last frame was a smart, intuitive place for this reference to text. Did you think about that as you planned and drew it?
Which of course leads me to another exercise: a three- or four-panel comic that includes only images until the last, which has only text, or vice versa. You can try both, but you don't have to.
I think my intentions with the last panel in the "image-only" comic were mostly to have a feeling of stillness. The first two frames have motion, and the motion needed to have some resolution for me.
ReplyDeleteI needed a focus in the last panel, and the empty packet would have felt blank without some suggestion of text. In avoiding the text, I used an icon for text (which is funny: an icon standing in for an abstraction) because I also didn't want it to be any specific sweetener. At the same time, I tried to make the text-icon look like the sort of text you would actually see on a sweetener packet.