Wordless Comics Pack (Dark Horse + Top Shelf) (1984-2014) (Dgtl)

Those unfamiliar with the medium often think of comics as being picture books with more pictures and not as much book: Read what little book there is to learn what happens, and look at the pictures to learn what it looks like while it happens.

Unfortunately, there are indeed comics to which that simplistic description applies. Fortunately, there are also lots of comics which are all about visual storytelling, just as much as, and in some ways even more than, that applies to motion pictures.

While I certainly value good dialogue on the one hand, and gorgeous artwork, even when it's not driving the story as such, on the other, for me the quality of the visual storytelling is the single most important component in how highly I value a comic as a whole. And that being the case, I consider wordless comics a particularly powerful and pure expression of the sequential arts. That's what this pack contains.



Three of the works are darkly humorous, and the fourth (one of Frank Miller's "Sin City" shorts) is equally dark but somewhat less humorous. For what it's worth, that aspect of the selection wasn't intentional, but I thought I should point it out...

Also, before you start reading, for lack of a better term, ask yourself if you tend to spend less time on the visuals than on the text - and if the answer is yes, do yourself a favour and make a deliberate effort to reign yourself in for these.

It's possible, nay, easy, to race through an entire wordless graphic novel in a few minutes, and you may not even miss much of the principal story, but you're going to get a whole lot more out of it if you slow down and smell, I mean, watch, the roses!