Comics as Contemporary Literature

This weeks topic as I saw it was reviewing graphic narratives that have achieved success in the market of more traditional literature. Of the books in this category I would describe them as having much more text and in turn having less visual story telling than some other comics. For me, the decision to go in this direction somewhat forfeits the power of a graphic narrative and moves more towards traditional novels. During this week I found myself bouncing between many different titles such as Bone, Asterios Polyp, and Why I Hate Saturn, in an attempt to find something with less text because I'm basically 12 years old when it comes to reading. I remember reading Bone in middle school because It felt like I was reading a book, but it was much easier to understand and much easier to get into for me. Where comics like these lose the direct visual story telling of comics that feature less text I feel they benefit from bridging the gap between comics and novels that is really nice for illiterate people like me who are still working on finishing "Of Mice and Men" from highschool. I definitely enjoy the concept of adding visuals to novels so I would say that I am pro Literary Comics, but in my current stage of life I am more interested in the more direct story telling of comics such as "Deadly Class" and "Rumble" where there is text, but it is exclusive to dialogue and some narrative. I would say as a whole these books are much more immersive for me because of their lack of walls of text. A problem I might have with literary graphic narratives is that some might assume that just because a comic has alot of text that it is some how telling a deeper or more fleshed out story, but I think over the semester I have definitely seen comics that are borderline silent text wise that tell me much deeper and interesting stories than that of the category of Literary Comics.

Overall, I think books like this can be great at getting people who struggle with reading easier access to these stories being told. I would love to see more of these types of books made for younger people, because I feel like as a decently intelligent person I always struggled with falling asleep while reading and being a super slow reader as well, and it would have been great to have more access to the same kind of stories as novels but told in this format.