The saying "A picture says a thousand words" is not just a way of saying that a picture generates many emotions. When dealing with a medium of information we get what we take the information we want and fill in the blanks with what we perceive is right. The ability for someone to gain information from a stimulus is what we call perception. But perception has nothing to do with the accuracy of the outcome you resolve from the stimulus; so someone could get a completely different resolution than what was intended by the author. In text this is really shown because an author has to use words in order to convey information from his mind to a text and then hope that the point he wanted to describe is understood by the reader. In visual medium it is much easier because rather than using words to generate a picture in your mind of the author's intention visual mediums give you the picture and you are left to form an opinion on what is given. In Scott McCloud's story "Understanding Comics" he creates a comic/graphic novel to describe how perception in visual mediums is used to convey a message while also showing us how context can change that message. In Stanley Fish's "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" he talks about literary context and how biases and suggestions can change how the reader takes information from literary text. These two literary mediums have a similar message but one conveys it through visual art while the other through traditional text. So, is there a difference in the message they convey and what the difference between these two texts and the context they give?

In Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics", he explains how comics use perception as a tool for conveying a message. He also goes very deep and explains mechanics that many graphic artists use to make images appear one way but be received in another way. The first example he used in his comic was a painting by a Magritte titled "The Treachery of Images" which brings up an issue of perception. While the painting says, in French, this is not a pipe when it is clearly an image of a pipe. What it is trying to get across that this is a picture of a pipe but Scott takes this idea further when he says that it is actually "  a printed copy of a drawing of a painting of a pipe"(McCloud 72). This awareness is interesting because when you look at the picture of the pipe with context of the picture frame you know it's a picture of a pipe. But take away the picture frame and without that context you will perceive it as a pipe while you are disregarding the fact that you are holding a book and therefor it is still a picture. This same idea of context is also evident in the first experiment of Stanley Fish in his story. When his students walk in to class with only a list of words on the board to greet them they use context to infer that was a poem that needed deciphering. The context being that they are in an English religious poetry class and that they usually spend time deciphering religious poetry. With this context they believed that this list of words was code to be deciphered but in reality it was only a list of names. The point is that context can be given from inside a medium or from and outside source but either why context is needed to accurately assess the information given. In Fish's class, I his list had a header that said for example "Authors" that context alone would have given the students enough guidance to come to the right conclusion. In the same way the description of the picture of the pipe prompts you to think more broad and come to a different conclusion leading to McCloud pushing it even further inviting the reader to think even broader and leading  to a completely different conclusion that that what would have been reached if not given any context. But context does not necessarily have to be given.

The fact that when many people see one painting but generates different ideas when no context is given must mean that there is another type of context acting on this painting. Also if all the ideas generated are different it must have to do with something different from person to person. This has to do with the viewer's point of view and experiences through life that color their perception and generate biases. As a person lives their life they generate preconceptions and biases. These biases are automatic assumptions that are forced on things that look or seem similar. For example in "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" the students were so educated and conditioned to analyze and break down literary text to find meaning. That education is a bias that took effect when the context was given that it was a poem even though it was just a list of names. But there Is a bigger bias that is in every person.

In his story Scott McCloud talks about human imagery in non-human things saying that "We humans are a self-centered race" (McCloud 79). He starts with how we humans see ourselves in the most abstract things like " taking a circle, two dots and a line and turning them into a face " (McCloud 78). That in itself speaks many things about us as a species and also explains why we impact the world the way we do. In nature for example clouds, trees and rock structures we see human faces in them. But we can take that a bit further and say that we are also obsessed with creating things in our image with faces on them like cars, robots and even electrical sockets. People are now starting to realize this and starting to take this into account like in the robotics industry most robots are not in the human form (one head, two arms and two legs in an erect position). This was because scientists and engineers have realized the human form was far from perfect. Especially in the sense of balance that's why most robots are usually designed in the shape of another animal. These examples point to something in our subconscious telling us that we are superior in every way even though we are not. This bias seems to be embedded in to our human mind and while we can account for it we cannot get rid of it.

While these two texts are similar in the message they give, they still have a great many differences first in the way they convey a message. Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" speaks about visual novels, graphic novels and comics it does this by way of being a comic itself. This gives an advantage to him because he can show you exactly what he wants you to see without going through the struggles of using imagery and colorful language to generate the picture in your head. But the interesting part of this comic is what he does with his pictures; similar to a mind trick book he uses pictures to trick your mind while also proving a point with his interesting progression. For example he talks about how cartoons more easily convey messages when the details are less defined and the picture itself is more simplistic. He uses his own comic as an example; he tells us that he chooses to draw himself in a simplistic form because it allows him to convey a message easily. In the next frame he draws a more detailed picture of himself to show us the difference in the way it conveys information (McCloud 83). This is because a more detailed picture of a human allows us to compare him to ourselves and make judgments on and impressions on that picture as we do in real life for other people. It is not just that it also draws attention away from the text, the message he is trying to convey. This creates a situation where the picture and the text are both fighting for importance in which the picture wins and takes focus from the textual message. This is not apparent in non-visual text for obvious reasons.

In Stanley Fish's "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" he has to use a diverse vocabulary and imagery to create pictures of situations and ideas in the reader's mind. But this can only be done if the reader fully reads and fully understands all of the information given through words, simile, metaphor, allusion and many other literary devices. Needless to say that looking at a comic frame takes marginally less work and understanding than a sentence trying to describe something then making statements about that picture. For example In Fish's story the first paragraph tells us what statement he is trying to convince us of then the next two pages are just describing the setting of what is going on in the story until the reader sees where Fish's statement from the first paragraph occurs(Fish 8-9). Some would say that visual text is superior because it is easier to read and conveys a topic more efficiently and effectively than written text. But that is wrong; because of its faults it generates a discussion and debate about topics. Which one would say is harder to do with a visual novel because of its efficiency delivering its message to the reader. So maybe it is that inaccuracy that may make text more favorable to some. 

When someone says "A picture speaks a thousand words" it can be taken literally. While it may take a novel one thousand words to make a scene then explain it a comic could do in in two sometimes one frame. The difference between these two texts are many but they still somehow come together to make similar statements on how context can change the meaning of a text. Context is everywhere it does not have to be given or taken but it is always an active part of the information gathering process. While the information itself is the main subject of the mind context can take that and change it to something else. Stanley Fish knows this through his simple experiments on his students, learning that context given can color a picture differently than when none is given. Speaking of pictures, Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" explains the mechanics of how visual context can change how a picture is perceived. But also how our inherent human bias can come into effect when viewing or creating things. Context is not something that can be ignored it is an always present entity that effects our judgment. 

