During class last Tuesday, we were lucky to receive a lecture from the gifted comic artist, Brian Fies, known for his graphic novels Mom's Cancer and Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?. Throughout his lecture, Fies stressed the importance of words and images working in conjunction in comics. Comics, according to Fies, is a "combination of words and picture that add up to more than the sum of their parts." He made his point by comparing comics to rock music. Without the lyrics, the music is just a repetition of a few chords; without the music, the lyrics are just bad poetry. So it is that were pictures of words missing from comics, they would cease to be comics.
Brian Fies's lecture was an exciting view inside the work of a comic artist. He talked to us about how he first got started with his web comic, Mom's Cancer, which was eventually published into a book, and what it took to get there. He was also informative about the use of space and time, split panels, visual allusion, character design, color, and collaboration to make his comics effective. In the end, the most important aspect of comics I took away from the lecture was the juxtaposition of words and images and the ability of comic artists to distill their subjects to the very essence.
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