When I was growing up, I found that the adult books did not have pictures in them while the children’s books did. I learned that many excellent stories were contained in the words but I still enjoyed the funnies and comic books. I heard the statement that a picture is worth a thousand words. I found that words only in radio programs such as Inner Sanctum, The Shadow and Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons could frighten me deeply without any illustrations or color, just speech.
I am confident that more people in a population can learn to write than to draw but that may be incorrect. The memorable and inspiring book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, showed me that I could learn to draw if I worked at it. If I spent as many hours learning to render a face or a scene as I spent in all the hours of my schooling working with printed words, I bet I might be halfway decent at drawing in a representational way. The drawings of Charles Schulz for “Peanuts” and of Scott Adams for “Dilbert” make me think I could turn out cartoons without being able to render well.
In today’s world, I might advance my ability to depict with little or no words better if I forgot about pencils and pens and spent my time with Photoshop or some other graphic program. These days, computers are famous for their ability to make such realistic pictures that they cannot be proved not to photographs.
Traditional teachers usually hold reading printed words to be a high-level and admirable activity while looking at graphic novels and comic books to be a lowly one. Reading a classic is often held by such people to be far superior to watching a movie of it. Yet, when the credits roll by and the number of people who contributed to the movie is made plain, it seems that movies, tv and theater are as powerful and important an influence as books, probably far more so.
In ancient Greece, the orator was held to be a good model of a well-educated and valuable citizen. As writing and reading began to be widespread, the citizen who put words on paper was the model of the valuable citizen. Most colleges still have freshman English courses in which a well written paragraph or report is the goal. But in the age of ads, YouTube, video cameras with sound tracks, it seems that pictures as well as spoken words, not writing, are gaining importance in our lives.
