How Comics can transform how you communicate
[Music]
hello
i’m neil gibson i’m here to talk to you
about how comics can transform how you
communicate
i like to start off by talking about my
grandmother
she was a remarkable woman she was like
the martha stewart of northern ireland
she she actually had to stop entering
baking and garden competitions because
she kept winning them all
um yet despite her vast knowledge of
cooking and baking
she never once ate chinese food
she was convinced it was made of cats
and dogs foreign muck she had no
interest
and we’d laugh at her and try and get it
to try but she refused and she was
convinced and she said that when the
first
chinese restaurant opened up in the
village all the stray cats disappeared
and we’d laugh listening to her but that
was a belief she genuinely had and
and she wouldn’t change her mind
and when it comes to comics i find some
people have
in my view a misguided belief a lot of
people think
comics are just for kids especially in
the uk
and i i mean i was i thought that too i
we went to loud comics when i was at
school uh at nine years i went to new
school
i was nine years old no band there
because i considered it rotted your
brain
so i didn’t read them until i was 14 i
saw someone had a copy of the beano and
i picked it up and it was
awful in my opinion so i thought i’m i’m
grounded for comics
and then in my 20s i was living abroad
and uh
i read a good one and i couldn’t believe
how much it made me think
the visual metaphors the visual puns the
complexity of the characters and the
storyline the dialogue and the world
that was created
and told visually in a stunning way i i
thought it was it was a work of art
and i it opened my mind to i never
considered that and then i became
a big fan of comics and um as you can
see i
i remember i flew back to london i was i
met a friend in a restaurant
and she was a bit late so i was reading
a comic
and she was surprised to finally reading
that and said he can’t keep reading
comics forever
and i found that very very odd um
i understand it because i had to
prejudice against it but you don’t see
people saying you can’t keep reading
books forever
or you can’t go to the theater forever
or you can’t stop watching
can’t keep watching films forever people
don’t say that but they do say that
about comics they consider comics
infantile
and what’s happening is that people are
confusing
content for the media for example you
have
sesame street and peppa pig but you also
have game of thrones and news night and
panorama
you have pantomimes and children’s plays
you also have shakespeare the next west
end big production
i don’t think a medium can be childish
but i
grant you that a lot of stuff in comics
is a lot of it is rubbish
but then i think a lot of things in
every medium is rubbish
i’m sure you’ve all read a bad book or
seen some terrible daytime tv or
um or badly active play for example
but the thing with all mediums is that
they all have their advantage
and advantages and i’d like to tell you
a few of the advantages of comics
and i’d like to start with pacing
can you remember being in a maths class
where the teacher is going a bit too
quickly and you can’t process everything
that’s going on
because for her it’s so simple it’s
these are the basic steps and
so she’ll um run through one quickly
or even just skip one entirely because
it’s so obvious and for some of the
other students it may be as
well but maybe for you it’s going a bit
too fast
or maybe it’s just going too slow all
the steps are going
it’s so slow come on just you don’t i
don’t need all this
people go at different paces now
with someone speaking in real life or
with the film
or tv you’re special tv tv film you’re
at the director’s mercy it’s where it’s
been edited
that’s the speed it goes out however
with the book um and with comics you get
to go at your own pace you can spend as
long as you like to absorb the
information or skip through it quickly
if you’ve got it
and with comics you have the added
benefit of the pictures
because pictures really say a thousand
words with one image you can see
a character’s body language their their
emotions on their on their face you can
with the coloring and see the tone of
what’s going on there and you can also
read what they’re saying
i’m going to show you now four images
and in a split second you’ll see three
things in each image
you’ll know what it is actually the
image you’re looking at you’re going to
see a face or a body and you’re also
going to see
an emotion okay so here they are
okay so first of all you saw the sink
and you saw the toothbrush holder and
the bag and the clouds
you also saw a face in the first three
and then and the body in the clouds
and look at the sink looks like you’re
worried below that you have the bag
which is
um almost smug really and then you have
this happy smiley toothbrush holder
and then you have uh the body and that
could be like
superhero about to crush someone with
their powers or it could be somebody’s
been crucified it’s a bit ambiguous
but you can see something’s there and
why did i mention this
is because with no effort you instantly
made sense of those pictures
you see so all of that having to even
think
our brains are hardwired to
visualization
i’d like to ask you a question about
that now and do you try and come up with
an answer
before you before i give it to you i
want you to think about it
because by doing that you’d be surprised
and learn more
what percentage of neurons in the brain
cortex do you think is devoted towards
hearing
what about touch more or less than
hearing
think about what music people listen to
it’s eight percent about vision
30 10 times more than hearing
vision dominates the other senses
even your retina itself is an outcrop of
the human brain
we are hardwired to understand images
more than text
but it’s not just the comprehension
understanding what you’re seeing that’s
being effortless it’s also the retention
and this is really important
several universities including the
university of oklahoma or the university
of sheffield have done studies uh on the
effectiveness of comic books
versus standard textbooks not
surprisingly uh most people prefer
reading information in graphic novel
format roughly eighty percent
but importantly it’s not just the
preference or ease the recall
when you read uh graphic novels is
significantly higher
they’ve done tests in um with cat scans
and
mris where people are watching a film
reading a book reading comic and with
comics the blood flow is the highest
your attention memory retention is
higher because you’re processing the
text and also the visuals at the same
time
editorial superiority effect if i
present information to you early
your average people remember about 10 of
it 72 hours after the fact
but if you add in a picture as you’re
talking recall source to 65
now that bears repeating adding a
picture to what you’re saying
means your people’s recall goes up six
times six fold the difference that’s
extraordinary difference
so i’m not going to show you um
different ways to communicate
it’s here’s a simple
excel spreadsheet there’s uh three
different regions and the production
over four quarters
some people will understand what that
means instantly but from the vast
majority
once you add a chart you can see the
trends much more easily you say okay red
is rising
the two declining and manager would uh
region one will think oh i need to take
action
okay that should be obvious that people
find it easier to see
charts rather than the actual just
numbers but what’s important is when you
add the chart you show them that people
remember
what your message was after the fact
so comics not only easier for people to
understand
but it’s also important they’ll remember
more afterwards so if you’re trying to
communicate something important i highly
suggest using comics
so how can you do that if you’re trying
to learn though
well i’m sure you’re familiar with the
doppler effects that’s when a car goes
past your pitch rises as it approaches
and falls when it goes away it goes
this car goes past you well stars
act like that as well with light south
astronomers know how far away stars are
because if it’s moving away to you or
towards you it shifts in the light
spectrum towards either the blue end or
red end of the spectrum
let’s say you’ve got a physics exam how
you remember which is which when you’re
under pressure is red closer or is it
further away
i’m going to show you one image now and
you’ll remember it for the rest of your
life you’ll never forget this
here we are the red sun
is setting over the blue sea which is in
front of you so red means
it’s further away blue is closer that’s
it
no effort in your part you’ll remember
that for the rest of your lives
which is closer which is further away
and
you can do this for so many things
especially if you’re studying and you
can do it with your friends get them
straight images and see theirs and
theirs is better it takes more than mine
great
i work with schools about this to try
and help people learn more because i
care about this
now primarily i make comics for
entertainment that’s what we do
but we also have worked with
corporations if they want to do
advertising or
training manuals get to teach people
stuff
when we first started making them we
found something unexpected
the first project i did was a warehouse
comic
for an international company they had a
new warehousing system and they want to
teach people how to use the new system
and we drew in the president and the
vice president and they’d be arguing
with each other and making jokes and
explaining the system
and and showing how it worked
and yes they were happy with that taught
the employees how to use it
but the reason they were really happy is
because everyone read it
they were used to sending out training
manuals or various things and people
wouldn’t read them in their emails
they’re too busy
this when it was printed was shared with
many people
because it was different it was funny
and it was something
that wasn’t just dry text
and whenever you want to teach anyone
anything
what you really care about is results at
the end didn’t make a difference
and i’d like to show you kilpatrick’s
model for sequential learning for me
i like to start this at the bottom going
backwards
what you care about when you teach
someone something is results did it make
a difference
it’s only going to make a difference if
they use what you taught them
they’re only going to use what you
taught them if they learn
what you taught them and they’re much
more likely to learn it if they like it
so comics well they’re fun they’re not
intimidating block of text people prefer
reading them training manuals
and memory retention is higher and
they’re quick to read you can learn more
faster
and do they use it depends on the
situation but
they’re more likely to be shared by
those because it’s a name different and
it’s fun
it depends it does depend on the
situation because it goes back to
content again
if you make a manual and it’s no good
it’s not going to have the results you
want
but you’re never going to know unless
you try and comics are being used in
many
different ways now not just training
even google used it to teach people
about the chrome
chrome browser when that launcher uses
comics to teach people uh there’s a
universities in japan and in bangalore
india which teaches medicine
using comic books because they found it
to be very effective
in the sheer number of of things people
have to learn
and in south africa they’re even using
comics as a legal document
let me show you this here you can see on
the top right hand side
someone picking in the calendar three
weeks at your probation period
okay picking fruit then left hand side
if you don’t meet the quota
you go home on the right hand side you
go above the minimum quota for
that time period welcome to the team
this is the contract
sign here
this demonstrates the versatility of
comics and clear communication is
critical in the modern digital reality
not all adults can formulate uh what
their thoughts precisely
and i work with an israeli company to
develop a course for children teaching
them
to develop better stories having skills
from a young age with the use of comics
so i do implore you to try making comics
to teach to get a
point get your point across but it’s not
just making comics uh that’s important
you can
you consume comics to learn what to
learn better
uh and the range of comic content is
enormous
mouse was the first comic to win a pure
surprise it’s a
fantastic story about the holocaust and
frames in a very moving yet digestible
way
i learned the theory of relativity by my
roommate
at university studying physics he had
this introducing einstein comic
and it’s fascinating i still remember
theory relativity to this day because of
that comic
you can also learn about the economy or
i learned personal journeys about what
it’s
really like in north korea or in
palestine uh through these
comics and my a japanese friend of mine
she read some of the classics of english
literature from shakespeare and
jane austen so that when she moved to
london she could go to business meetings
or
dinner parties and talk about british
culture in a knowledgeable way
without having to spend the time to
properly consume it in its original
format
may not be the best way to experience
the art but it depends on what your
objectives are
so i’m going to leave you with this um
not everyone is visually orientated
ed some people are kinesthetic some
people are auditory
ed catmull of pixar fame is famous for
not being able to read poetry but then
he tried
audio books and he became addicted he
loves poetry but he can only hear it he
can’t read it
comics isn’t the best medium for
everyone but for the vast majority of
people it is the best way to learn
it really is so important to give it a
shot if you want to communicate to
people so they understand what you’re
trying to say
and remember it comics did transform
your my life
and i hope they can transform yours
thank you