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Why did William Hogarth avoid using captions and speech balloons in his picture stories?
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comic strip
Thirteen panels from the comic strip Gasoline Alley by Frank King, 1921. It shows Walt Wallet feeding and then chasing the turkey that he and baby Skeezix have raised for Thanksgiving dinner.
William Hogarth avoided using captions, speech balloons, and other traditional broadsheet paraphernalia in his picture stories because he aimed to achieve a purely visual narrative richness. By dispensing with these elements, he relied on his exceptional physiognomic finesse and a deep sense of satirical counterpoint to tell his stories.1
Hogarth believed in the power of visual storytelling and permitted only such inscriptions as could be introduced naturalistically into the scene. This approach allowed him to elevate the broadsheet picture story to an aesthetic level that has rarely been surpassed, ensuring that the narrative was conveyed entirely through the visual details of his work rather than through explicit text.1