Reading drawings

Follow a thread... looking for work by poet Ana Hatherly (above is The Writer, 1975) brought me to a blog discussing comics, on which there is a post about the many similarities between comics and architectural construction documents: 

"Superficially, the pages of both tend to convey information in similar ways: drawings of simplified pictograms are ordered into grids of panels, often in conjunction with text and an elaborate system of symbols and line weights." Ah yes, symbols - a "writing" system ... a series of iconic pictograms ...

The post takes "a rather narrow look at architectural working drawings, and the commonalities and dissimilarities they share with comics". And very informative it is - architectural drawings are organised from the broad (site plan) to the narrow (details) and a series of identification tags and bubbles take the user to the appropriate page. Text is descriptive, calling out materials and processes. Arrows indicate the part being discussed.

The post also reveals why I have "trouble" reading comics - "how do we know how to read a comic? We seem to inherently want to read panel-to-panel in the same way we read prose: left to right, top to bottom. However, even the most basic arrangement of panels does not always follow this pattern, with unusual arrangements of tall or wide frames that seem to disrupt the eye’s flow. Navigating a comics page is a learned skill, one that is arrived at through trial and error." (Below is Ozamu Tezuka's "Space")

Reading, then, is a learned skill - and that applies not just to reading words/text. Aha. "Reading" is a useful word - with slippery meanings. Or perhaps our perception of "reading" is due to our own old habits?

I'm intrigued to learn of the work of Chris Ware, who not only uses architectural spatial conventions but adds "diagrams that function on the same level as architectural drawings. They can communicate a large amount of information that, if it was told as part of the narrative, would interrupt the flow of the story.... Ware often inserts these diagrams into and around the narrative in the least disruptive way possible; he tends to save the most elaborate ones for covers, endpapers, or frontispieces, while working the simpler ones into the body of the comic. Like an architect, he uses a standard set of symbols to signify a complex set of relationships in the clearest manner possible."