Comics and Poetry

I am the harshest critic I've ever met when it comes to poetry. It's not because I'm avant-garde or because I think poetry has to be in a very specific form to be acceptable. My main problem is that I don't think people understand that poetry is condensed language.

In a poem, every single line has to be necessary. Every word in that line has to be necessary. They all have to convey meaning. There's no reason to say "I was going to go the store" when I could drastically shorten it up by saying "Walking to market". If you can say something in a simpler way, do it. If you can cut out words or lines or even whole stanzas and still retain the same meaning, cut them out.

The efficiency from poetry lends itself to denseness. Once you start thinking about making very word count, the next step is to make every word count twice. Words can not only say what you want them to say for surface meaning, they can use sounds for melody, words that fit in a theme for subtext, shorter or longer words for rhythm, etc.

Comics are just like poetry. They are efficient, condensed language. A single panel has to show the audience location, action, characters, and emotion just with pictures. And since the pictures need to show so much, the text needs to be just as powerful. Anything that can be cut needs to be cut. Having the right words to say just what you mean helps tremendously to do that.

I am less harsh of a critic of comics (in the sense that I won't go into violent tirades at the sight of bad comics) only because not as many people think they are good at it. However, I am still very critical of it. If a comic has a lot of fluff in image or word or in some other way just doesn't excite me, it is instantly recognizable and I won't continue reading it.

The one nice thing about comics and poetry is that, no matter how much theory that people can make up, no matter how much people will create something and then justify its quality, the fact of the matter is that the work speaks for itself. If the reader doesn't like it, no amount of rhetoric in the world will change that.