When to use a visual metaphor

In comics, a visual metaphor can take us where no other medium can

I was reading Jim Terry’s marvelous Come Home, Indio, and came across this chapter heading. It’s so good, even my bad phone photo of it is immediately clear.

In Part 3, Jim as a young adult moves to Chicago. What’s he going to do there?

DRINK, and drink and drink. It’s so arresting and emotional and communicative.

After that, I’d like to show some images from David B’s Epileptic, then some of my own.

So these are by David B, expressing the epilepsy of his brother as this dragon.

Here is his brother with other ill children, each suffering a different ailment. The specifics don't matter, but he creates this vivid monster creatures.

David as a kid is constantly battling the idea of the illness...

Additionally, when his grandfather passes away, we get this amazing sequence, in which he begins to see his grandfather as a sort of bird spirit for the rest of his life.

Here they are as a family trying to move through this journey of finding healing for his brother, depicted as a river or long, tumultuous ocean journey.

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I used something to similar in my memoir, our journey of getting out of New York City started with a small boat, and then became a journey of healing ...

I mentioned how the metaphor was more real than reality was, and really helped me get across what I was feeling, here's an instance of us coming to a friends house. I tried drawing it the "normal" way and it just felt wrong. I brought the metaphor back in and it felt right...

In the final image, I changed the text to reflect the metaphor, which felt even more right to me...

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Move in part 2, thanks for reading!