your collage on Harry's schizophrenia drives me up the wall, because it's SUCH a cool and well-executed idea and inspires me to try something similar, but comics are so uniquely perfect for it and none of the topics I'd want to focus on are comics. </3
(I guess I don't really have a point to this ask, I just think abt that collage a LOT)
Oh, I absolutely get that frustration, wanting to do something similar with non-comics things!
A comics collage is kind of like an AMV: it lets you relive something you know but cut up to be punchier, and with an additional layer of ideas on top helping reinterpret what you see. Unlike with an AMV, though, the collage makes it equally as easy to use an academic paper as your reinterpretation-medium as it is to use poetry. Or both! At the same time!
The comic format is unique in that... Okay, I'm going to get into an Amateur Media Theory ramble here, so bear with me.
Audio is a one-dimensional medium: you can only go backwards or forwards in it along an axis, and it drags you along at a predetermined speed.
Text is also one-dimensional (there is only one "correct" order in which to read a paragraph), though you can set your own speed.
Images are two-dimensional. Your eye can explore at its own speed up, down, left, or right.
Video is three-dimensional, but the time dimension is not controlled by you (like with audio) and limits your ability to explore each individual image.
The fragmented text of comic books extends some of that user-controlled two-dimensionality to the way you approach words. I can use a combo of comic images + cut-up poetry techniques to change how the reader experiences the texts I'm using as a source.
Anyone writing an essay has to decide on an order in which to introduce their ideas. But what if you wanted to approach your concept as a cloud, or a tree with multiple parallel but contradictory branches? What if you wanted to leave visible gaps in your argument to demonstrate that some parts may be left out on purpose?
I love the idea of "web-weaving" that's popular on tumblr right now. It encourages ideas to be considered together without having to commit to just one linkage or interpretation. Like with comics, it can include images beside text, skipping the necessarily lossy attempts to convert one to the other.
But despite the "web" idea, it's usually presented as discrete chunks of text (or images) for the reader to consider one after another. The reader may construct a web of connections themselves. But in the comics collage, I can show the reader the overlaid jumble of wordless connections, contradictions, and associations much closer to how it appears in my head. High dimensionality, high information density, high creative control--and it all looks pretty darn cool.
