Picturebooks
Chaperoning Words
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Sanders, Joe Sutliff. “Chaperoning Words: Meaning-Making in Comics and Picture Books.” Children’s Literature: 57-90. Web.
Referrer: Chris Vitale
Categories: picturebooks, comics, visual storytelling, methodology, image/text
Annotation:
Sanders is making the argument that comic book study and picture book study are intertwined. In this lengthy paper, we are introduced to a methodology for determining the difference and meaning between the messages and forms of these two genres. Theory is a difficult thing to apply to comics and picturebooks according to Sanders. Instead he proposes the notation of the obvious differences among the two forms in order find a solution to his defined problem. Sanders states, “if they have even the dimmest awareness of the impact of shape, line, color, and pacing (and I suspect they have quite a cunning awareness of a wide range of aesthetics), they are chaperoning key elements themselves.” Sanders section entitled “Fixing Meaning” is particularly important for it’s treatement of the word and image dynamic in these forms of literature. The two genres combine words in a fundamentally similar way. The major takeaway is as follows: “in general, if the book anticipates a solitary reader who chaperones the words as they go about their work of fixing the meaning of the images, that book is a comic; if the book instead anticipates a reader who chaperones the words as they are communicated to a listening reader, that book is a picture book.”
