Word+Image: Brian Fies

Guest lecture, Brian Fies, discussed his comics, Mom's Cancer, and Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow.  He tied his work as a comic book artist to many of the ideas and concepts presented in McCloud(?).
One thing that he presented was his design process and the specific elements of comic book creation that was important to him.  One aspect of comic book designing that was important and essential to him was an interaction of words and images.  He did not want his words to exist without the images, and visa versa. It was important to him that both the words and images function together to produce a stronger effect in the reader.

Words and images presented a way for Fies to express experiences that other mediums did not.  One example of this is Fies usage of metaphors, such as "drowning in scientific terminology." If Fies was writing a novel, he could have easily written "The scientific terminologies that the doctors used drowned my mother. She could no longer understand what was going on with her anymore." But rather, he understood his mother's experience to be much more than anything that could be expressed through words alone.  He found the answer is visually presenting the experience, through words AND images. With just a few panels, not only will he be able to say so much more, he can also depict the psychological and mental effects the cancer was starting to have on his mother.

One metaphor that I really enjoyed was the tightrope walking one Fies used to exemplify his mom's struggle in balancing her medications. It really captures the difficulty of the experience.  Not everyone can be a tightrope walker, but in this case, Fies' mother is metaphorically forced to be a tightrope walker.