Light of Thy Countenance: Fate of overdosing pictures and destrucion of literature

I would say that the Light of Thy Countenance by Alan Moore is a literature. It is mainly different from poem and novels with just words because graphic novel, like this one, is basically all pictures with very few amount of words, unlike Pattern Recognition and many others, however. The point of literature is to express the authors feeling, thoughts and ideas. Traditionally, words and possibly structures, mainly in poems, are the only methods to express them. As, time pass, visualization through picture became part of that method to express authors' thoughts, feelings, and ideas.

Picture provides additional dimension for more definite understanding in Moore's novel. Visualization not only provide clear and quicker understanding in concepts and ideas, but also helps readers to feel them with one of more powerful sense, our visions. With combination of Moore's poetic writing style, this novel brings the depth of writing but with much clear understanding from graphics. For example, there is a scene where couples watches TV. The narrator of this novel, TV says “You listen to my voice in rapt attention, yet grow bored or easily distracted when your lived one speaks” (45). Narration simply describes the situation but the picture shows the couples emotions and readers have more clear understanding of what is going on in the novel. 

In this scenes and many other ones, TV's attitudes is very pompous and superior to the human kind. Regardless of it's great usage and quality of picture as literature tool, Moore is trying to telling the readers that too much of visualization can damage our ability to express our thoughts, feeling, and ideas that are biggest part of our identities. One of the image from the novel shows a girl with a head made of TV, showing couple kissing with quote, “you learned to kiss in Peyton Place” (44), meaning that our expression, such as kissing, is from what we see from TV, not of our own unique and original expression. In addition, the full pages of picture may allows the readers to ignore the small texts in the novel, missing the authors thoughts and feelings. 

Picture is great tool for literature, allowing the readers to have more clear understanding; however, when the readers ignore the texts in the novel, it no long possess its function as a piece of literature.