School is weird—five out of seven days of the week,
toddlers, children, and teenagers alike all go to school to eat the weird food
and learn the weird material. In art/photography class, the teacher tells her
students to paint a landscape or take a photograph so vivid that it tells a
story. After working through blood, sweat, and tears, the same students pack
their bags and shuffle along to English class, where the teacher tells the same
students to write a story so incredibly vivid that it paints a picture or
captures an image in the heads of the reader. It’s humorous how the subjects
that we learn all involve something that they are not, and in this way, they
are beautifully poetic or engagingly complex. Art involves storytelling,
English involves painting, mathematics involves letters…the list goes on.
Now when one tries to combine these abstract complexities
into a more logical way of understanding, perhaps…oh, I don’t know, a graphic
novel (?!?!?!?!?)…it is considered childish or “not real literature”. Simply
because graphic novels usually involve easier understanding does not correlate
to a noncomplex idea or expression, as many may seem to believe. After all, we
are all addicted in some way to the idea of a hidden meaning. So, the words
tell a story, but they also paint a picture. The pictures capture the image,
but they also tell a story of their own. It seems to me that graphic novels do
twice the damage, but all in one blow.
