Drowning in Words

Last week in class, we had a guest lecturer, Brian Fies, come talk to us about his career as a cartoon artist.  What stood out to me the most about his lecture was his explanation of how he experienced his mother's illness.  His book, "Mom's Cancer," was his outlet for expressing what he and his family were going through at the time.  It was interesting to hear him explain his position as both a participant and an observer, because he was experiencing everything at the same time he was cartooning about it.  In his book, he expressed the emotions of particular scenes through his juxtaposition of drawings with accompanying text.

In particular, he described a moment when his mother was feeling overwhelmed by all of the medical jargon being thrown around and discussed.  Instead of just writing that out in prose, he relied on visual imagery to convey the notion of his mom feeling weighted down by all of the medical information fed to her.  He drew his mother in the act of drowning among a bunch of medical terms written on the page as if they were a body of deep water.

His way of describing the events that took place through unified visual and textual language is very successful. Without having to narrate the entire story, his comics explain the process by means of graphic information.  The combination of words and pictures throughout the book enhance the design to make it as clearly understandable as possible.