Our work on summaries has caused a total 180 degree shift in my thinking– in high school, we were taught to move away from summaries or reports. Summary was considered to be an elementary-level work, completed competently by anyone and used only to take up space in a book report. That there could be multiple accurate summaries of a work had never occurred to me, and yet of course a summarizer choses what to focus on. I just hadn’t realized that could be used in an intentional way– I thought that there was one “best” way to summarize each work.

As someone who is quite into in comics and graphic novels (what Gillian Whitlock would have us call “graphic narratives” http://www.jstor.org/stable/27649737 ) I have been incredibly interested in our analysis of Persepolis. I have spent a decent amount of time studying both visual arts and graphic novels, and that knowledge combined with our exploration of summary has helped me to solidify a concept that has been kicking around in my mind for a while. Namely, that art, and specifically comics, are a visual summary of what they are depicting.

This new knowledge of the malleability of summary has made the word “summary” seem all the more accurate to describe comics. As no two people experience, remember, or talk about an event or object the same way, no two people would draw it the same way either. And even one person will probably change their depiction depending on the context and the audience. You’ll tell a story differently if you’re talking to your grandma or your friend, and depending on how you might feel about it that day your retelling might have a completely different tone. The same goes for summary: each artist has their own style, and manipulates that style in order to use to represent the emotions and subject matter that they are portraying. Add onto that each author’s choice of words, layout, and design, and comics become an incredibly effective tool for presenting something to an audience.

Professor Laurie McNeill (if you’re reading this, uh, hi) has described summary in our ASTU class as an “act of remember and forgetting.” The writer chooses what to leave out and what to include– and in the case of abstractions, sometimes what to add. When talking about comics as summary, I would incorporate the idea of exaggeration to these two other acts. Comics aren’t super realistic. Depending on the style, some come closer to reality than others, but in my experience they usually take considerable stylistic liberties. This exaggeration, this “hyper-realism”, is what I think partially makes them such a powerful form of communication. Take charicatures, for example (those goofy, completely over-the-top sketches you can get drawn of yourself at carnivals)– looking at them, one would be hard-pressed to say they look real, and yet you can pretty much always tell who they’re depicting. They are a good visual summary– they don’t include every detail, but they embellish the critical and important features so that the audience knows exactly what to focus on.