 When you were a small child, you probably read picture books. In the next two videos, I want to show you some strategies for reading the adult equivalent of these kinds of stories, graphic narratives. Like those picture books from your childhood, graphic narratives usually include both pictures and words. However, as you'd expect, the relationship between the pictures and words in graphic narratives is often much more complex than the relationship between pictures and words in a picture book written for children. In those picture books, the images on the page usually reinforce or complete a textual narrative. In this example from Moe Willems' terrific Elephant and Piggy series, Gerald the Elephant points to a bowl that Piggy carries and asks, what is that? Piggy holds up the bowl and replies, this is slop. Simple, right? What about this passage from Chris Ware's graphic narrative Thrilling Adventure Stories, I guess? A painfully awkward, coming-of-age tale of a young boy who is so obsessed with comic books that he dyes his underwear different colors so he can look like a superhero. While he's looking for adventure, the story he delivers is far from thrilling. Once my grandmother told me this really funny story about my grandfather. She said she was up in the kitchen fixing dinner and he was in the basement getting dressed after taking a shower. She heard this really loud yelp and she ran to the top of the stairs to see what was wrong. He said that he'd zipped himself up in his fly. If we look at the images that accompany this narrative, we're immediately confused. Why is a person being shot? Who is this caped superhero who crashes in from the glass roof to save the day? And what the heck does this have to do with the grandmother's story? As the submittedly extreme example suggests, graphic narratives can often be understood as two stories in one, a textual narrative and a visual narrative. These narratives are placed in juxtaposition with one another, calling your attention to differences or contrasts, as well as to unexpected similarities between the two stories. In the passage from Ware's graphic narrative, the seemingly simple and mundane textual story somehow translated in his head into a hyperbolic, cartoonish visual story. Being the two narratives together is a strange experience for sure, and at first the two stories appear totally unrelated to one another. If we give it some thought, however, here and elsewhere in Ware's story, we can begin to see some common features that cross over between the visual and textual narratives. Both narratives involve pain, the pain of being shot, and the pain of, well, zipping yourself into your fly. Both involve observation, the grandmother checking on her poor husband and the superhero observing the crime in progress. Finally, both involve zips and flies, though the words are obviously used very differently in the visual narrative and the textual narrative. Identifying these ideas in juxtaposition with one another, we can begin to make sense of this very strange passage as the story of a boy struggled to translate unfamiliar phrases and events into his own limited and comic book-obsessed worldview. When the boy hears that the grandfather quote zips himself up in his fly, the superhero zipping and flying through the roof is, perhaps, what he thinks. This is obviously an extreme example, but it does remind us that we should slow down when we read graphic narratives to consider how the words and the images on the page are juxtaposed rather than reading the visual narrative as a mere complement to the textual narrative. Here's one more example from Linda Berry, a short comic called Help You. The textual narrative involves a young girl named Maybon struggling to practice her typing skills in class while dealing with the trauma of being abandoned by her father. The textual narrative places this anxiety in juxtaposition with the visual narrative, her father at an anonymous bar seemingly oblivious to the destruction that he has caused. There may be other contrasts and similarities at work in this passage, and if you spot any, I hope you'll share them with me in the comments section below. So now that we've established a fundamental property of adult graphic narratives, the principle of juxtaposition, the next question that arises is how exactly to analyze visual narratives. As our YouTube series suggests, there are a ton of terms for describing what's going on in literary texts, but students of English literature may not have as developed a vocabulary for close reading visual narratives. In the next video in this series, I'll try to give you a handful of terms that I've found useful in my teaching and research to get you on the path to thinking about and writing about graphic narratives in as sophisticated a manner as you now read textual narratives. In the meantime, stay healthy and have fun reading your next graphic narrative.