Can Richards’s Reviews > Why Comics?: From Underground to Everywhere > Status Update

“As a verbal-visual art form, comics is inherently about the relationship of word and image, which is to say, about different ways of communicating. It makes readers aware of limits, and also possibilities for expression in which disaster, or trauma, breaks the boundaries of communication, finding shape in a hybrid medium.”

“Historically, there has been an association between comics and a kind of subpar literacy, as if comics reading could not be “real” reading. This is because of the widespread notion that visual literacy, which comics requires, is somehow less complicated than verbal literacy, which comics also requires”

“Cognitively, one’s eye usually first takes in the whole page, even when one decides to start in the upper left corner and move left to right. This is sometimes called comics’s “all-at-onceness,” or its “symphonic effect.””