K.I.S.S. or to kiss?

It seems that a growing push in online media is towards simplicity. The paragraphs are shorter, white space is emphasized, and we hear advice such as, "speak as if you were talking to a 7th grader." If this is the wave of the future, I think that I, like other people in the writing program, have an ideal of writing that may be outdated and soon to become extinct.

In the McCloud essay, there are  certain things he brings to light that are so obviously apparent, yet so ingrained in our culture that we take it for granted. For example, the specific roles that words and pictures should have. We have the ingrained idea that pictures are more simplistic than writing and he shows us the escalation of the reader throughout maturity, going from pictures, to mixed, to pure text. If someone was to turn Ulysses, by James Joyce,  into a comic, it would be the simplistic version of the book, one maybe meant for teens or young adults. It would have lost its deeper meaning and interpretation. This may be in part due to the notion that artists have of trying to mirror the style of writing with a style of picture. The artist might/would probably try to copy the artistic integrity of Ulysses, with realistic pictures and vivid landscape, but by so doing, would create a dissonance between the two forms that contradicts itself and the appropriate message to convey. This is because, as McCloud illustrates, the two specialized forms of writing and illustration differ in purpose and are not interchangeable on their extremes.

However, if an artist would create a comic book out of Ulysses, with iconic representation and simplistic figures, it would be interesting to see how the enjoyment would go up or down with the book. By using a comic figure as a self imposed representation of ourselves, the main characters would be seen in a reflective frame and we would probably identify with them easier or not, depending on the artists perception of each character and how Tolstoy wanted them to be imagined. This is, of course, meeting on the base line of the triangle that McCloud shown, with the two "pure" forms as opposites. But what if we go higher and higher, into the abstract creations of each genre? What happens then?

I can't imagine to be honest. It is exciting for me think about and at the same time a little disheartening. It is one of the pleasures of that book to decipher the meaning from the confusing prose and lack of time or place. If pictures were inserted, I'd imagine that they would have to be abstract, in order to mirror the style of Ulysses. Yet, according to the pyramid, the words would have to be simplified, in order to match the level of pictures.

While I'm writing this I can't help but think of a Roman rhetor/rhetorician named Quintilian who argued that we evolved and became the dominant species specifically because we were able to speak, and that this was the original supreme function, our language. He then considers rhetoric to be the ultimate art, the art of speaking well. What this brings up for me, is something that has defined my writing and one of the reasons that I write. If writing and especially really good writing deals with the abstract, and with rhetoric-complex ideas, then how can pictures compliment this abstract writing and if it can't, what does this say about the future of our writing and the topics that we feel the need to discuss? If we have to supplement everything with pictures in order to be considered inside the status quo, then do we have to dumb down our subject material? Or, could abstact pictures complement complex writing and could  both work hand in hand?

I don't know, but it does seem that this is the future, and since I have no skills in drawing, it means I must either collaborate with an illustrator(?) or change the content of my subject in order to reach the mainstream.