The Frank Book is interesting because it is “written” entirely without words, allowing the reader to make up text and sounds in her head. Despite the lack of type, the book displays emotion really well, using sweat beads for nervousness or smiles/frowns and other facial expressions, or images within speech bubbles to indicate dreams or thoughts. I really liked the series at the beginning of the book with Franks “dog” and the dogs friend who take a day together. When reading The Frank Book it was interesting because even though I have experience reading comics, I always feel like comics are a slower read than novels for me because I have to go back and digest each image in order to really understand the meaning as a whole. Some things translated much easier than others -the first story in the book had some odd scenes in it that took, for me anyway, a bit of divulging to really know what was going on.

After reading this book I feel that for a comic without words to succeed, the characters emotions must be depicted very strongly, and the order of images within each panel must artfully display the thoughts or the focal points of characters. A comic with words can get away without as clear a visual dialog or can skip around to different places panel after panel; and I think the more words there are the more surreal the images can be (unless the point of the piece is a somewhat surreal juxtaposition of images, but the point of the work couldn't revolve around a narrative). Beowulf was able to have a little less emotion in the characters (I think the emotions -or after reading McCloud the symbols of emotions- where much more exaggerated in The Frank Book) and it was able to have a slightly more abstract panel to panel transition, because its text helped to clarify.