Show, Not Tell
Today in For Better or For Worse, we have what I would call just a plain bad strip. One of the nice things about the sequential art medium is that you don’t have to rely on large amounts of dialogue to get a point across. I consider one of the masters of the medium, the late, great Will Eisner, who could tell whole stories, and communicate character and emotions without one single word balloon. But today’s strip was nothing but expository dialogue about things which would have been 100 times more effective if they had been shown and not talked about.
Tomorrow’s strip: This is more like what I am talking about, except it too, is also lots of panels of the doctor giving us expository dialogue. Show us the mind of a child. This is a comic strip, not a book.
Tomorrow’s strip: This is more like what I am talking about, except it too, is also lots of panels of the doctor giving us expository dialogue. Show us the mind of a child. This is a comic strip, not a book.
posted by howard at 6:46 AM
2 Comments:
We definitely need more "show" and less "tell." If we actually saw Gramps, unable to speak, having thoughts where he confused Elly with Liz and failed to recognize Phil, that would not only be more powerful than yesterday's conversation, it would also make loads more sense.
Lynn does seem to be in the habit of only showing one perspective on her stories. With Liz and Anthony, for example, all we see is Anthony's thoughts. With Grandpa Jim, it's been all Elly and Iris. We make fun of the lack of Liz and Michael participation, but it has the feel of a writer who doesn't want to take the time to give us a more rounded picture of the situation. The consequence is you get a lot more tell than show, which makes a lot less sense, when the dialogue is coming from an observer like Elly or the doctor, and not a participant like Jim.
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