Comic Book Artists Great American Writer
December 14, 2020
Comic book creators and Hemingway share a natural kinship. The comic book page demands an economy of words, and for multi-panel stories a lot of the action takes place between the panels. It’s an interactive reading experience, much like Hemingway’s work. It demands that you interpret and bring yourself to the text, like Hemingway’s less-is-more “iceberg theory,” in graphic form.
In
Death in the Afternoon(1932), Hemingway expounded on his theory that what is left out of a story gives it power, that the act of omission strengthens a story. Hemingway contends that in the hands of a talented writer, a reader “will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” Comic book artists and writers similarly make choices that require both surface and thematic readings, with narrative info