Create a storyboard where the image does not depend on the text and the text adds something new to the narrative.

This exercise is a light-hearted look at the role of image and text.

•  Aim for it to be around 10 frames long.
• Draw the picture storyboard first and then add the text.Note how the story is affected when the text is added.

Introduction

I approached this exercise by first thinking of a storyline of seemingly mundane activities and then sketching them out. I am a fairly poor sketch artist so the drawings are crude and I stopped at 8 frames. However, it is clear from the frames what the series of events is.

Storyboard

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Without any captions or text, the series shows the progression of someone’s day, starting with them being in bed the night before and ending with them going back to sleep at the end of the day. The events in between are familiar with work, exercise, dinner and relaxation featuring as the day progresses. I deliberately didn’t add much in the way of additional context, apart from the sun, moon and crucifixes, primarily because of my lack of skill at drawing.

Adding Text

Review

When I drew the frames, I intended a cartoon that highlighted a typical day that might be experienced during the current pandemic. Like many people, lockdown presented a structured imprisonment of online meetings, trying to find something interesting to liven up the everyday experiences such as cooking, my government-sanctioned exercise and on numerous occasions excessive alcohol. We were trying to make the best of the situation and to a certain extent it worked. In the frames without text, the story is pretty clear from the way the elements denote meaning (e.g. the moon denotes night time etc). Each frame contains symbolic messages that we recognise owing to our experiences of the pandemic, but also connote aspects of a stressful life with the idea of ‘work hard, play hard’ which is driven by social and cultural references.

I realised that another side of the pandemic was the forced isolation at home that in some cases put people’s relationships under unprecedented strain. Although evidence of increases in the number of separations during 2020 are largely anecdotal, it makes sense that the relatively trivial behavioural traits that might annoy us, could be amplified by having to spend significantly more time together in a confined space. Thankfully this was not my experience but thought it would be interesting to imagine an underlying tension as a layered narrative to the cartoon. When the text was added, the images immediately offer alternative interpretations. The relay text supports a connoted message within the image but makes no reference to any literal element within the frame. Now we have the relationship issues being played out by a narrator who could be the man in the story. The religious iconography that supports some keeping faith that everything will be alright could be seen previously, but the symbolic message is potentially different with faith in ’emerging from the pandemic’ being replaced by ‘overcoming problems’. The underlying story remains the same with a day passing linearly though the 8 frames. However, now the text makes us question the causes and engage with the misery of the character.

Conclusion

The use of relay in the comic strip as described by Barthes was the idea that appealed to me the most. When we pick up a comic, the text directs the reader through the core story but supports, and is supported by, the imagery. The fascination with comics and graphic novels is where the connection between the text and imagery leaves more than enough room to create the narrative. In this case, the crudely simple series of sketches take on a different, more emotionally demanding set of meanings by the inclusion of the text. Both stories are engaging, but for me one has more impact through the structural application of the text than the other.