Everyone is familiar with the old adage that claims “a picture is worth a thousand words”, but can one really gain as much knowledge of an experience through an image rather than pages of textual descriptions of every detail? Generally, students are disengaged in the content displayed through a history book, primarily because they believe that they have no similarities between those living in the Gilded Age and find it hard to sympathize let alone understand any individual from that time period. When viewing historical events through a graphic novel, a student will naturally become more emotionally connected. The student can understand a perspective on any manner because the student will gain a sense of living through the time period when
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A graphic novel helps a reader connect in a more personal level than a textbook does. In a historical textual source, such as “Give me Liberty” by Eric Foner, readers feel disconnected to those who lived in the time period or were apart of a historical event that is being mentioned. Authors do this by putting a large amount of people into a broad category as Foner did when stating that “...the segregated army confined most of the 400,000 blacks…” (Foner 708). Four hundred thousand is an inconceivable number and the only trait that the student really knows about these individuals is that all of them are black and are in the segregated army. The reader will not realize that those involved in the segregated army lived very different lives individually; they all came from different backgrounds, social …show more content…
Robert C. Hoffman was a young American who was wounded several times in war and briefly describes his experience in the hospital. Though his book, “I Remember the Last War”, gives a face and a name to the past in a similar sense that Max Brooks’ novel does, it is still lacking the visual representation that a graphic comic has. Hoffman writes that “[t]he hospital was already filled. Great numbers of men were dying…” (Shi 179). A lot of students have not experienced being in a war hospital or medical center in the middle of a war, and therefore the image that is painted in the reader’s mind is not always accurate. On page 85, Brooks shows an illustration of a man who is completely bandaged and is missing both legs from the knees down. Blood is visible on the sheet of the bed, which is a detail that many readers may not have realized because they have to visual way to connect to it because most hospitals do not allow patients to sit in blood soaked sheets after being bandaged. Similarly, the next page shows an illustration of a room filled with hundreds of injured patients in beds (Brooks 87). Some students may not realize how crammed these medical centers in the military were, and may have been under the impression that it was structured more like a hospital that they
A graphic novel helps a reader connect in a more personal level than a textbook does. In a historical textual source, such as “Give me Liberty” by Eric Foner, readers feel disconnected to those who lived in the time period or were apart of a historical event that is being mentioned. Authors do this by putting a large amount of people into a broad category as Foner did when stating that “...the segregated army confined most of the 400,000 blacks…” (Foner 708). Four hundred thousand is an inconceivable number and the only trait that the student really knows about these individuals is that all of them are black and are in the segregated army. The reader will not realize that those involved in the segregated army lived very different lives individually; they all came from different backgrounds, social …show more content…
Robert C. Hoffman was a young American who was wounded several times in war and briefly describes his experience in the hospital. Though his book, “I Remember the Last War”, gives a face and a name to the past in a similar sense that Max Brooks’ novel does, it is still lacking the visual representation that a graphic comic has. Hoffman writes that “[t]he hospital was already filled. Great numbers of men were dying…” (Shi 179). A lot of students have not experienced being in a war hospital or medical center in the middle of a war, and therefore the image that is painted in the reader’s mind is not always accurate. On page 85, Brooks shows an illustration of a man who is completely bandaged and is missing both legs from the knees down. Blood is visible on the sheet of the bed, which is a detail that many readers may not have realized because they have to visual way to connect to it because most hospitals do not allow patients to sit in blood soaked sheets after being bandaged. Similarly, the next page shows an illustration of a room filled with hundreds of injured patients in beds (Brooks 87). Some students may not realize how crammed these medical centers in the military were, and may have been under the impression that it was structured more like a hospital that they