Literary head on a cartoon body

I love art. I love books. I do not love books that tell stories with art.

Comics, cartoons, graphic novels—I can’t read them. It’s not that I’m averse to their subject matter; I love to laugh and I enjoy a dark tale as much as the next reader.

I brought this up with my son, who detests reading novels but has always enjoyed comics and graphic media. When I try to read a graphic novel or a comic, my brain gets—for lack of a better word—antsy. It’s hard to concentrate and I’d rather just not do it. He told me that’s exactly how he feels when faced with a page of text.

I figured there must be something in our brains that makes this so. A Google search on “brain physiology why do some people like graphic novels?” led to Brian Kane’s blog on graphic texts. One of his posts contains a section on the psychology of perception. Jackpot!

Kane’s blog post asks the fascinating question, “So what does the brain ‘see’ when it ‘sees’ a page or panel of sequential art, and how does it derive meaning from this literate art form?” The answer, I’m sure, holds the key to both my difficulty with—and my son’s enjoyment of—the medium.

Kane relates the perception of meaning to several branches of psychology including gestalt and cognitive. My real aha came from his section on neuroscience. Research into the neuroscience of perception is ongoing, with—believe it or not—sub-disciplines such as neuroesthetics. There is evidence of specialized cells in the brain responsible for responding specifically to straight lines!

Thinking about this lends a new dimension to the idea of keeping an open mind. Our minds themselves may limit their own openness to particular types of art and esthetics; neurophysiology may account for the fact that not everyone will get their kicks from a 500-page roman a clef. And the people who do will likely not get much from Jeff Smith’s Bone series, which my kids so loved during their elementary school years, or Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus.

But I have decided to attempt to overcome my neurological deficit. Here and now, I am committing to read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution that has been compared to Maus.

I’m sure wondrous rewards await between its covers if I can just make my antsy brain stay still long enough to discover them.

What about you? Are their types of art that seem to resonate with your brain?

Related articles

• Final Thoughts on Graphic Novels (teacherleaders.typepad.com) – A contrast to Kane’s ideas.
• Understanding Maus (thepenguinblog.typepad.com) – A guide by someone whose research “is concerned with non-mimetic narratives of the Second World War.”
• How Graphic Novels Became the Hottest Section in the Library – Publishers Weekly weighs in
• Why Graphic Novels? (whybehumansp13.wordpress.com) – a 21-year-old student asks about the place of graphic novels in education

Upcoming

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