Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative by Will Eisner
Published 1996 · 164 pages · 58,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative to read?
Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative scores 37 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Plain practitioner prose written for working cartoonists and students of the medium.
- Sentence structure: 46 out of 100
- Abstraction: 63 out of 100
- Storytelling principles are general but always anchored to specific illustrated examples.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Information is distributed between text and illustration, each carrying complementary loads.
- Narrative indirection: 13 out of 100
- Eisner states craft principles directly then demonstrates them; no argumentative indirection.
- Symbolic density: 11 out of 100
- The show-don't-tell principle operates as an organising metaphor for the whole argument.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Earnest and instructional throughout, befitting a master teaching a craft.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Each principle is stated, illustrated, and concluded within its own chapter.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Chapters organised by narrative function: story, character, timing, and visual composition.
How Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative is regarded
Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative holds a literary regard score of 86 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.