Brian Fies use of Words & Images

Brian Fies came as a guest lecturer to our Design 001 class this past week and really discussed his creative process and all that went into creating his graphic novels. He really focuses in on the relation between words and images, and how that really defines what comics are. “The combo of words + pictures that add up to something.” As a comic artist he has to understand the way words and pictures add up to something, and he must know what that something is. Fies states that “comics transcend words and drawing” but they are something that works with space and time while uses symbolism and metaphors within both the words and images both. He enjoys using both words and images together because it allows for multiple ways of speaking to the reader. He can incorporate metaphors and symbolism into the words that his characters speak, or that the narrator speaks. With his work on Mom’s Cancer he was able to tell the story of his mother’s struggle with cancer as both an abstraction and as a clear description of all the emotions that were being felt at that time. Without incorporating both words and images in this novel, he couldn’t have gotten his point across as he had wanted to. Fies is able to communicate many emotions and situations with the combination of words and images which he wouldn’t have been able to do without if he was only working with one of those components.