Styles and Messages

In the excerpt we read from Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud briefly discusses the theory (and he fully acknowledges that it is theoretical) that art style plays an active role in putting forward the message of a given comic ("Vocabulary of Comics," pp. 36-37). I agree that art style is vital, perhaps the most important aspect of the genre. If the choice of art doesn't function with the writing and the story itself, the final product is going to be weak.

I willingly out myself here: I adore novels and literary non-fiction, but I love comic books. As a kid, I casually read my dad's old Marvel comics. It's only since I started college that I began to see comics as, in many ways, the optimal form of storytelling, capable of becoming a solid piece of literature as competently as prose. Historically, significant public interest has been lost under a single sub-genre (superheroes); over the last two decades or so, the quality of comics - both content and art - has skyrocketed, and the graphic novel is gaining more mainstream respect. Works like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, I believe, has been very conducive to this.

As for Persepolis, I believe Satrapi has made a fantastic demonstration of McCloud's idea of how simplistic art can be helpful in conveying a higher message. Although the content of her book is anything but juvenile as she writes and draws her experiences as child in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution, her use of cartoons enhances the topics that are brought up: activism, torture, the rise and fall of political regimes, war and its inevitable tragedies.