Graphic Novels + Social Media

In the last year or so I've begun to get more and more into graphic novels, books that the majority of people would shrug off as "picture books". This very much frustrates me, because when you think about it, the descriptive nature of literature is simply replaced by imagery in graphic novels, and if anything this is a far more definite and precise way of the author indicating exactly how they want their readers to interpret each scene.

Having been working on a great social media project for our client Sony Ericsson over the past few months, I've tried to take some of this thinking into what we do on a daily basis. Images are far easier to consume than words, and in the social media sphere, this is becoming more and more relevant as peoples desire to very quickly skim and dip in and out of content becomes apparent.

Engagement doesn't necessarily need to be an intricate process where you talk to a consumer with words and try to elicit a response. With social media, there are so many ways of creating scenarios and providing content that is deemed worthy of attention (be it film, pictures, games) that words are only a small part of it. As such, I'm beginning to feel that if the PR world is looking to utilise social networks effectively it needs to occasionally remove words from the equation, in order to see a bigger picture, and remember that there are more ways than words to talk to people in social media.

Back to the whole graphic novel scene, I just finished "Preacher" (very kindly lent to me by Pete, a graphic novel enthusiast himself), which is one of the best stories I have ever read, for numerous reasons. I'm now about to begin another series from Garth Ennis called "The Boys", and have thoroughly high hopes for that too (again, another Pete recommendation). The next step is to start getting all of these in a digital form, but I think that for now the desire to have the books in my hand still overwhelms the need for a compact solution with all of my books in one place. For now.

As an aside, a digital equivalent I do love is Ctrl Alt Del, which is the perfect blend of comics and my major vice, computer games. Another I love is Cyanide and Happiness, but beware, once you start, you can't stop!

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