Reading vs Viewing Images

The page above is the start of Watchmen #4.  In the issue, Dr Manhattan narrates his thoughts as they jump through time.  His descriptions of the setting and place are clinical.  He is on Mars.  He is looking at photograph before dropping it.  He turns to gaze at the stars.  He refers to the photograph of being of a “man and a woman” without clarifying, at first, that it is him in the photograph before the accident that would turn him into a demigod and he is with the woman he once loved.   His words are cold and distant, but the juxtaposition of a happy photograph to that of a man standing on a dead planet staring into the void seen in the visuals of each panel complete the imagery of isolation and disconnection.

Authors put a great deal of effort in describing places, people, etc and we as readers are usually left a fair amount of room to fill in the gaps.  I have always struggled with visualizing these descriptions.  In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, he describes “The Sprawl” which is a massive mega city running from Atlanta to Boston.  Even after reading the descriptions, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around what something like that might look like.  It wasn’t until I saw the movie Blade Runner that this image I had read connected with me.

I do believe more interesting things can be done in terms of story telling when authors choose to use visuals and text together like that of a graphic novel.  However, when reading descriptions the flexibility given to the reader can also be beneficial in how it impacts the reader.  Maybe in a story there is an old, dilapidated house a group of people enter that is meant to be scary.  I immediately visualize a house that I swore was haunted when I was a kid.  If I were shown a visual of the house the author had in mind, it may not have the same effect on me.