What does that look like?

Imagine different illustrated versions of Aesop’s Fables. They might be pretty books, and in each version, the pictures would, of course, add to the Fables. But the Fables might work without the pictures too. It would be a predominantly verbal narrative. On the other hand, here’s a famous wordless picturebook, The Lion and the Mouse. It’s also drawn from a fable by Aesop. But as you can see it’s got no text, or barely at all - in order to follow the story, you need to make sense of the sequence of pictures.

This is an example of a mostly visual narrative.

And here’s a picturebook in which you have enhancing or complementary relationships. It’s called Shackleton’s Journey,

and it’s what we’d call creative non-fiction: you can see how much the drawings enhance the solely factual descriptions. For instance, look at this beautiful collection of minute vignettes that show you

what the team take on board: the exact number of dogs, the precise number of clothes.

Everything is tidy and in its place: an ideal expedition. Of course, this is not like the messy reality of what all these dogs would be like. The picture presents the dreamed idea of the expedition, a fantasised orderliness.

Later on, as the boat becomes rocked by the ocean, it looks tiny and fragile on the page, and the picture mimics paintings or engravings of big epics – the Odyssey, Milton’s Paradise Lost – to make the expedition look like something of Homeric proportions ; another facet of the same fantasy.