Image over Text: "Visual Emphasis" and Understanding Comics

Abstract

Beginning with its definition of comics, McCloud's Understanding Comics focuses on the medium's visual nature. Though the book offers a brief taxonomy of the word–picture relationship within panels, its emphasis on the image leads McCloud to overlook important ways that text can function on a comics page. Some of the book's most influential ideas, especially its theories of closure, panel transitions, and reader–character identification, are constrained, and at times undermined, by their visual emphasis. This essay argues that paying greater attention to text productively complicates McCloud's theories and expands our ideas about the comics reading process.