Radio, An Illustrated Guide

I’m not sure how much sense it made to make this as a comic. I almost never paid a significant amount of attention to anything in the panels really besides the text, and the problem with this is that it is not always easy to read long segments of text in a comic. It is both unappealing and difficult to read large texts this way. It does however make it easier in other ways by breaking the text down into more digestible chunks.
Problems with form aside, I thought this was a very interesting read. I have been noticing more and more that there are a lot of ideas and strategies in readings like this that I think are obvious and would take no thought to do but then I realize that I would not have thought of them on my own. They seem simple but are really just taken for granted. This really hit me hard when Ira starts talking about the form of a narrative. I thought adding suspense and anticipation would be an obvious thing to do for any story, but the more I thought about it the more I doubted I would have made an active effort to look for these things without being told of their necessity beforehand. It is always an odd realization to notice how much more work actually goes into making pieces like the examples shown through out the comic. I also really liked the advice of testing out hypotheses on the people being interviewed to really get the good answers out of them. It was really interesting reading about how radio is one of the only forms where conclusions must be told and cannot be inferred. I am not sure how I feel about this, as I always liked the idea of people taking their own meaning away from something without being told what to think about it. Despite this, his advice still makes sense though, but for what reason, I do not know.