Having just finished watching The Wild Bunch, and continuing to charge through the AFI Top 100, it has occurred to me that I might need to explain the primacy of film as a storytelling influence for me.

Why film?

Kazu Kabuishi, editor of the Flight anthologies and creator of Amulet and Daisy Kutter, has cautioned against making comics as treatments or pitches for film. I tend to agree. I also agree with Alan Moore that comics ought not to be the poor bastard offspring of literature and film. It is a worthwhile, valid medium unto itself, and creators of comics should not feel it is any less.

That being said, film and comics have in common a singular emphasis on sequential visual storytelling. Though comics do it only through space (i.e. the page and panel) and film does it through space and time (i.e. on the screen over time), they both are comprised of images comprehended by the audience over time, and at the core they are visual media.

More to the point, film has been the most dominant means of visual storytelling in the last century. For this reason, I would argue that the largest number of storytellers and visual artists over the last few decades have gravitated towards film. It stands to reason that film would lay claim to some of the most talented visual storytellers ever (though not exclusively, of course). I think anyone working in visual arts in general — and of course in visual storytelling in particular — can only benefit from studying them.

(Of course, I am far behind in watching film, but you know what they say, there is no believer as enthusiastic as the recently coverted. Also, I have mentioned “film” and not “television”, which is an obvious bias on my part. But television recently seems to have become film’s equal in quality, thanks to shows like The Sopranos and The Wire. And frankly, one could effectively argue that film and television are the same medium in different formats, in the same way one could consider comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels the same medium.)