This summer we’ve resurrected one of our favorite features, I ♥ Comics, and each Wednesday through Labor Day comics bloggers and creators will discuss the things they love about the medium.
This week, our guest contributor is Jennifer de Guzman, editor-in-chief of SLG Publishing. She also writes a column for Comic World News and maintains the SLG Publishing blog.
Here’s a confession: Comics are not the storytelling medium I love best. That place in my heart belongs to prose. I have degrees in English literature and creative writing, and when I tell stories, prose is the medium that comes most naturally to me. I adore words, and even as a kid didn’t balk from reading books without pictures in them.
However, as much as I would like to believe that words can express everything, I know that sometimes they can’t, and that sometimes they need to step aside and let images do the talking. Page 9 of Shenzhen by Guy Delisle brought that to light for me.
Like Delisle, I recently took a trip to China, and while my stay was far less extended than his, I encountered many of the same difficulties and experiences. Drawing to communicate with locals is one of them — Delisle covers that on page 20 — but the experience depicted on page 9 is one more intimate and far more difficult to describe. I know that it is because I tried when I returned to the U.S., and no one seemed to quite “get” what I was trying to show them through my words.
You see, every hotel room I stayed in while China — every one (I stayed in four cities) — had a console table between the beds, and the table had buttons on it from which you could turn the lights in the room on and off. The problem was, they were often unreliably labeled, so one would often have to cycle through the buttons in a state of exhaustion (China seems to produce that state more than any other) until you finally got all your lights turned out for the night. It was pretty funny.
At this point, I say, “I guess you had to see it.”
And that’s why I was so excited about page 9 of Shenzhen — because Delisle shows that experience. Now people can see what I’m talking about, and those visuals are matched with his charming description of his hotel room as his “own little universe.”
That’s what I love about comics — they blend mediums to convey more than perhaps words or pictures can convey alone. Inspired, I tried my hand at using the comic book medium to relate an experience I had in China. Unfortunately, I can’t draw, but my husband Brian Belew filled in for me there. I’m sharing it as part of my I Heart Comics feature because it is a story I want to share, and I chose to tell it as a comic. I love comics because they tell stories, and more than any particular medium, stories are what I love the best.
August 15th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
The thing with the lights was great.
Had my all kinds of smiling. I can imagine how disappointing the book thing could be as well, excited to have some familiarity in a foreign place but then….
August 16th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Yes, I remember the lights thing, too! I visited China in 1993. Also, the thermos with the badly designed spout! Yes!
My sad book experience had to do with the libraries in China. I was part of a library delegation, and so we were taken university libraries in Beijing and Suzhou, to school libraries and public libraries in Beijing, Nanjing, Suzhou and Shanghai. Having worked in public libraries in Hawaii and a college library in Southern California, I was appalled at the lack of books – a law school library in one city didn’t have any kinds of standard texts one would expect, their periodical collection was pitiful. And in most places, they had nothing on their shelves dating back past 1969, not even fiction. Their Cultural Revolution did so much intellectual damage that they didn’t want to acknowledge … but we could see it.