McCloud on How Words and Pictures are Combined in Comics

After a quick penetration of McClouds "Understanding Comics", one thing that could be directly related to our project is the variations of interplay between words and pictures in comics. Words and pictures can be regarded as the information channels in comics (together with shape of panels and space between panels).

According to McCloud, words and pictures are combined in the following ways:

Word specific combinations: "pictures illustrate, but don't significantly add to a largely complete text."

Picture specific combinations: "words do little more than add a soundtrack to a visually told sequence."

Duo-specific combinations: "both words and pictures send essentially the same message."

Additive combinations: "words amplify or elaborate on an image or vice versa."

Parallell combinations: "words and pictures seem to follow very different courses - without intersecting."

Montage: "words are treated as integral parts of the picture."

Interdependent combinations: "words and pictures go hand in hand to convey an idea that neither could convey on their alone."

This could be related to the notions of conflicting, redundant and complementary multi-sensory displays that Erik elaborated on in a previous post. I guess every single of the combinations above have their optimal uses for different purposes (immersive, narrative, etc.) - most interesting for us should be the interdependent interplay between information channels, to provide an experience as rich and immersive as possible for the player.