The announcement in PW of Lio's creator and cartoonist Mark Tatulli having a new middle grades graphic novel published has brought a nearly immediate knee jerk comment to the PW blog: why, the commenter doesn't wonder, do kids get yet another "dumbed down" offering in lieu of a "real" book? announcement in PW
Such comments are rife, have been rife, and I suppose will continue to be rife wherever those who lack even an iota of imagination cannot make the step from literary text to literary image, from one artform to another. And damn both in their inability to be themselves "real" readers.
Readers bathe in a creation that provides information, story, image, pulse. Readers decode without consciously removing themselves from the what with which marks present themselves as being guideposts to the "real" meaning they provide. As Art Spiegelman is fond of noting, sequential art imitates the life of the mind by portraying through a flow that combines word and image, the very same as our thoughts wander from thought to reflection to question to insight.
Real readers don't denigrate other readers' experiential contact with the mind's eye.
