Visual Argument

VISUAL ARGUMENT

Visual Argument

Matt Bors is angry and he’s not going to take it anymore, or at least that’s the tenor of his “Can We Stop Worrying about Millennials Yet?” — a multipanel visual argument that appeared under the “Opinion” tab of CNN’s Web site on July 9, 2013. Bors, a thirtyish, Pulitzer Prize–nominated editorial cartoonist, mocks complaints made about his generation — one that reached adulthood around the turn of the century and then ran smack into the Great Recession. Who can blame him for being ticked off?

Reading the Genre

Compare the aggressive and detailed (almost “busy”) arguments Matt Bors makes in his multiple cartoon panels to the calm and wordless argument made by the New Yorker cover on page 69. Could you turn Bors’s multipanel argument into a single image? How might it differ in aim and impact? Or would it be more interesting to translate the visual argument into a conventional essay or editorial? Consider, for example, how a written text might recreate the sarcasm in Bors’s drawings.

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All images on this page: Matt Bors.