Word and Image

Author Brian Fies of the comics, “Mom’s Cancer” and “Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow” emphasizes how comics transcend words and drawings. He say s that words and pictures coming together is art. He says images serve as metaphors so they can portray words as a feeling and relatedness. For example, his book Mom’s cancer is about his mother’s struggles with cancer and chemotherapy. Fies wanted to tell his mother’s story and make the readers understand what she went through.

To the left shows his mother tightrope walking while balancing a pole over a pool of crocodiles. Now, the mother did not literally do this but Fies used this metaphor to express how and what his mother was mentally going through. The mother is trying to balance on the rope in hopes of no falling into the pool. This shows her battle with chemotherapy. For people who do not know what chemotherapy entails, they have a better understanding of what is would feel like. As one can see, the process of chemotherapy is a dangerous and rigorous battle. Without the images, we see the words chemo which one would know refers to chemotherapy. Without looking in a dictionary, what does that mean? Some readers do not know, maybe would not look up in the encyclopedia because it takes too much time. Fies uses imagery in his comics very nicely to convey what it metaphorically means. He does not tell us straight up that it is a treatment for a disease by killing cancerous cells. He does not go in depth with what it is but allows the readers to imagine how scary it is, like tightrope walking over a pool of crocodiles.