The Importance of the Visual Aspects of the Text

I noticed that a few others in the class posted on the visual elements that accompany a graphic novel. Being completely new to the genre, "American Born Chinese" was my first expereience with this type of novel. I was surprised at how much this literary type resembled a story board for a film. Just to clarify what a story board is, it's a visual representation of what the camera will "see." Thus, it is a series of images usually done in frames (or panels) with a caption included.

This aspect of the novel was key in understanding Jin's relationship with his ethnic identity through visual means. Without the pictures the text would not carry the same meanings. In the first section of Jin's story, he tells us of his visits to the herbalist with his mother. The story in the panels plays out like a film scene, and is most comparable to a story board sequence. The boxes of text can be imagined as a "voice over." Frame 1 (pg. 27) can be viewed as an establishing shot, giving Jin's story a setting and developing a visual relationship to the herbalists wife. Just as in film, or as the picture would be dispalyed on the film's story board, the words are not solely significant to the scene. The herbalist's wife towers over Jin. He sits in the far back of the frame and appears very tiny and very child like with his toy. The wife is in the front of the frame, dominating the image. The next frame is a close up of what she is doing. The words are there to provide the reader with context, but in this one example the pictures not only speak for themselves, but are essential in portraying the situation.

Thus it seems evident that the words and pictures function on both an independent and dependent level. The words guide the images, and the images can also function as seperate entities. This relationship is clearly displayed on pg. 32. In this sequence Jin's isolation from the others is evident in four panels that do not have any words. The middle one, like a story board frame is a "long shot" of Jin. He is completely alienated from the other children's "close ups" in the three panels above his.

In recognizing these similarities that "American Born Chinese" had with a film story board, It became more obvious that the images in the graphic novel are just as important and in some cases even more significant than the words.