Powerpoint (or Keynote) slide software solves the problem of presenting an audience with a narrative that demands both verbal and visual elements. A slide presentation succeeds when the visual display works with the verbal communication of the speaker to create a narrative in the audience’s mind. The juxtaposition of pictures and words conjure connections and meaning that pictures or words alone could not.

Some of the best uses of Powerpoint come from the masters of verbal/visual, picture/word communication: cartoonists.

On her tour for Fun Home, Alison Bechdel projected panels from the graphic novel as she read the narration aloud:

Scott McCloud uses an epic slideshow to take his audience through his theory of comics:

Chris Ware and radio host Ira Glass have collaborated on “Lost Buildings“—basically a radio story accompanied by a slideshow:

My advice to all who want to use slide software for stronger presentations: read some good comics. Pay attention to pacing, sequence, and the way cartoonists weave verbal and visual elements to tell a story.

Trash the templates, abandon the bullet points, and find the right combination of pictures (your slides) and words (your voice) to communicate your narrative.

Any other cartoonists I’m missing here? What are the best slide presentations you’ve witnessed?

Links:

• Understanding PowerPoint: Q&A with Scott McCloud
  Extremely intelligent discussion of Powerpoint in terms of visual language and comics
• More posts on Powerpoint

Chris Ware’s Introduction to The Best American Comics 2007

…lately I find myself frequently torn between whether I’m really an artist or a writer. I was trained and educated as the former, encouraged into the world of paint-stained pants and a white-walled studio where wild, messy experiments precipitate the incubation of other visual ideas— though I’m just as happy to sit at a desk in clean trousers with a sharp pencil and work on a single story for four or five days in a quiet and deliberate manner. In short, I’m coming to believe that a cartoonist, unlike the general cliché, is almost—bear with me now—a sort of new species of creator, one who can lean just as easily toward a poetic, painterly, or writerly inclination, but one who thinks and expresses him- or herself primarily in pictures.

A lengthy interview with Anders Nilsen:

When I set out with a clear idea of what I want to do, it becomes super simplistic and neither illuminating to me nor the readers, so that doesn’t work. It sort of just happens by accident, really. I think it’s because I’m interested in these things, so when I draw the first panel, for me to draw the second panel it will have to have dealt with something. The biggest issue is how to get out of your own way, how to explore issues without forcing it, without forcing yourself to do it. If you do ten pages of comics that are just not interesting, you’ve just got to throw it away.

Supposedly, Chris Ware loved this particular Gasoline Alley strip by Frank King so much that he tore the page out of the Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics book and had it mounted on the wall of his studio. Given my fondness of the “style of the old woodcut pictures,” I had to rip it off, myself.

I got this great tear sheet scan from Roger Clark’s fantastic archive of annual Gasoline Alley “autumn walk” Sunday pages.

Really awesome article this morning in the NY Times about artist William Utermohlen, who after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, began drawing/painting self-portraits. The self-portraits, viewed in chronological order, reveal the gradual deterioration of his mind and spirit.

Because Alzheimer affects the “right parietal lobe,” it gets harder and harder to visualize an image and be able to draw it. Art by Alzheimer’s patients becomes “more abstract, the images are blurrier and vague, more surrealistic” and “sometimes there’s use of beautiful, subtle color.”

Looking at these two pieces shoots cold lightning down my spine. It’s so hard to admit to yourself that something you think you do with your heart and soul is really just a bunch of wires connecting your hand to your brain. Maybe it’s for that reason that I find Alzheimer’s to be the most terrifying disease out there.

We’re machines, and machines break down.

I’m also wondering if this Chris Ware quote has any significance:

I see the black outlines of cartoons as visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas, and I try to use naturalistic color underneath them to simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience, which I think is more or less the way we actually experience the world as adults; we don’t really “see” anymore after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together.

And I hate to quote Franzen, but he what about this:

Scott McCloud, in his cartoon treatise “Understanding Comics,” argues that the image you have of yourself when you’re conversing is very different from your image of the person you’re conversing with. Your interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he’s an Other. The image you have of your own face, by contrast, is highly cartoonish. When you feel yourself smile, you imagine a cartoon of smiling, not the complete skin-and-nose-and-hair package.

Even towards the end of his abilities, Utermohlen could still make a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line.

Even if it was the face of a ghost, it was still a face.

The BBC also has an article…

The Sunday NYTimes came a day late to Circleville this Easter, so Meg, Mom, and I read it over a breakfast of leftovers. I was reading what looks to be the last installment of Ware’s Building Stories series, and Mom said, “What do you think of that?” And I said, “well, I read it for the technique, but the story lines are pretty boring.” And Mom said, “That’s what I thought, but I was afraid that you liked it.” Then she explained to me that she found it really hard to read, after a lifetime of teaching kids left-to-right, up-and-down. So I told her that I thought everybody who comes to his work basically has to re-teach themselves to read. And she said, “Oh, good. I thought I was the only one.”

THEN I was reading in the Book Review about Flaubert, and I had remembered that somewhere (?) someone had suggested that Jimmy Corrigan would make a great companion to Madame Bovary on a reading list. About Flaubert: “Sentences were laid as carefully as fuses. Progress was excruciatingly slow.” And: “The romantic in him wanted to soar above it all, to write a book of pure music, “a book about nothing,” a book held together only by the “internal force of its style.”

That’s all I’ve got. I’m going to grab my old copy of Madame Bovary to take back to Cleveland for further rumination.

Tonight we’re going to drive straight up to Oberlin to see Lynda Barry. I’m really interested to see what a fiction “reading” by a comics writer looks/sounds like. Since I always bring my sketchbooks to these things, I’m going to use Brandy Agerbeck’s graphic facilitations and Alison Bechdel’s recent renderings of a visit to the Center for Cartoon Studies as inspiration. (Check out the program at CCS, by the way. That’s what I’d like my MFA studies to look like. If only CCS had funding and accrediation…)

If you want some more reading, check out Etgar Keret in the funny pages, and Sammy Harkham’s “Black Death” from CRICKETS #1 as a webcomic.

As if to counter Meg’s complaint (and mine, too) that so many graphic novels seem to be written by men “who are emotionally still teenagers”, Chris Ware chimes in:

You’re on a time delay as a cartoonist, I think. It takes so long to draw comics that you end up writing about things that happened maybe 15 years or so before. Charles Burns just finished, after 10 years, a book about his teenage years. And he just turned 50. So that’s about the relative spectral red-shift that we’re on as artists.

Well, that’s kind of depressing. Listen to the whole interview.