Telling Stories with Symbols vol. 1

Since the first time our ancestors learned the art of speech, or complex verbal language, we have told stories. Through these stories, often told around simple campfires among small tribes of people, we have past down our heritage, our culture, our traditions, and our beliefs. Stories in a way have been our marks on this world, our footprints left in the mud, tiny pieces of ourselves that we entrust to the next generation in hopes to gain some sort of sense of immortality. Fast forward 100 thousand years or so, and you’ll see the same thing. Though we’ve now traded the campfires for movie theaters, comic stands, bookstores, and TV sets; but all and all things haven’t changed much, humans still enjoy a good old fashion, well told story. Though the mediums have grown broader and our technology has advanced, the storyteller still wants only two things from their audiences: to understand what they have to tell them and care enough to stick around till the end.

Today storytellers use different tools to capture an audience, but the process still remains the same, the juxtaposition of symbols in such a way as to create a connection in the human brain. But how can we utilize this connection in our minds and the minds of others to tell our stories? How do we combine words and images, symbols, to successfully tell meaningful stories? And finally what is the very structure of a story to begin with? To better answer these questions we must dive into the realm of modern story telling mediums that combine images and words, we must dive into the realm of comics, prose, animation, and film. Over the course of this blog I hope to answer these questions.

So let's start a bit with comics:

Comics are the medium that is most famous for blending the imaginary line of pictures and words. Turn the pages of almost any comic book and you’ll see words working together with pictures to create something neither could alone. They give the world inside the pages life, give a voice to the characters, capture the essence of sound with sound effects, and create a sense of seamlessness. “Comics is a medium of fragments – a piece of text here, a cropped picture there – but when it works, your readers will combine those fragments as they read and experience your story as a continuous whole.” (McCloud, Making Comics 129)

Comics can trace their origins all the way back to the ancient walls of the Egyptians and so can the fist written language. In a way comics, or hieroglyphs, is the first recorded form of storytelling. Yet for centuries images and the written word have remained separate and rarely mixed. Often ignorant scholars write off comics as a lesser art form, and glorify more traditional media like novels. Like most things in life, as Scott McCloud proves in his famous book Understanding Comics, these imaginary lines of separation are nothing more than an illusion. Take the word cat for an example. It is merely three separate symbols, letters as we call them, combining to inform our brain of what sound and animal they represent. Draw a picture of a bunny and you get the same thing, an abstract representation of the creature known as a rabbit. Everything we draw and write is a symbol, language, but it is how we combine them to communicate with the audience or reader is when the real magic begins.