Held as part of PEN American Center’s impressive international literary festival, PEN World Voices, the event “1,000 Words: The Power of Visual Storytelling”—featuring a star studded panel of international artists—began a little late. But all was forgiven once the moderator, novelist/performer Jonathan Ames, got everyone’s attention with his amazing, animalistic “hairy call.” He explained it was an audio warning he and his friends had used to alert each other to oncoming peril when being attacked “by more normal children.” Like a literary starting gun, it kicked off the panel discussion.

On stage (l. to r.) Shaun Tan, David Polonsky, Emmanuel Guibert and Jonathan Ames. Photo by Sarah Moroz

Best known as a prose novelist, Ames has recently veered into the graphic novel terrain with The Alcoholic (created with Dean Haspiel and published by DC/Vertigo), a frank, roguish, and often moving autobiographical chronicle of his life under the debilitating influence of alcohol. Unafraid to make a few shameless plugs for his book—and then laugh about it—he brought a cheeky levity to the panel discussion.

The format was a conventional one: Ames introduced the three panelists—Emmanuel Guibert, David Polonsky and Shaun Tan—and asked each to talk about their work individually, instigated conversation via panel questions and finally opened up a public Q&A. Yet the event was anything but standard, thanks to the artists’ compelling work and the articulate, self-aware manner in which each was able to present it.

Guibert, a French illustrator known for Alan’s War and The Photographer (Both from First Second), had an amiable countenance and spoke easily to the audience. He explained that real-life friendships were the catalysts for his stories, and that the art of listening has been integral to his projects. Fascinated by the experiences of his friends, he asked them lots of questions and remained attentively silent as their adventures were recounted, turning their accounts into graphic novels. In Alan’s War, American ex-pat Alan Coperecalls his memories as a young soldier during World War II. In The Photographer, Guibert’s friend Didier Lefèvre’s photographs, taken in Afghanistan in collaboration with the humanitarian organization, Doctors Without Borders, are mixed with comics illustration, like a personal war diary. The project was triggered by Lefèvre’s photo contact sheets, which visually resemble the page layout of a graphic novel. While war is a difficult subject to address, Guibert said: “people have a hunger for contemporary history”; they just need the proper “space and time” of a personal testimonial, instead of a whirlwind of depressing facts.

Polonsky, an Israeli artist, is best known as the art director of Ari Folman’s harrowing animated film, Waltz with Bashir, which details Folman’s efforts to restore repressed memories of his life as an Israeli soldier serving during the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Macmillan's Metropolitan Books imprint is publishing Polonsky and Folman's graphic novel adaptation of the animated film. The use of comics illustration, Polonsky explained, to depict the narrative was apt because the “ability to show things that don’t have any material existence” corresponds to the volatility of memories. Polonsky cited Otto Dix and German post-Expressionism as a touchstone for inspiring the visual tonality.

Tan, a highly regarded Australian sci-fi illustrator and kids book artist also known for creating the much-lauded wordless graphic novel, The Arrival (as well as the recently released, Tales from Outer Suburbia , both from Scholastic ) , described his ethereal style and compared the modus operandi of the artist to that of the immigrant—the subject of The Arrival. “The act of drawing is defamiliarizing everyday objects,” he states, much like immigrants have to constantly reprocess their quotidian reality in a new environment. Tan also explains why no text accompanies his painterly illustrations: “the moment you use English, the story stops being universal.” He also relays that his Malaysian-Chinese father speaks English, his second language, in truncated sentences, and growing up with minimalist use of language influenced him. Absence of language slows one down and allows one to be more contemplative about what is being expressed.

All three artists discussed the fact that their works are vehicles for other people’s stories, and Ames, who indulges in autobiography for most of his oeuvre, asked the panel if they ever considered autobiography. Interestingly, the responses were quite unanimous that distance from the subject matter fuels creativity and imagination. Guibert eloquently stated that working on someone else’s biography is, in fact, a means of working on an autobiography, because the way you treat someone else’s memories is also reflective of yourself. The “capacity for evocation” in interpreting someone else’s story wakens the artist’s own past, and the elasticity of memory taps into a universality of human experience. Above all, he said, sincerity gets the feelings across more than being accurate about individual experiences, he said, which Tan and Polonsky readily seconded.

The panelists had much in common, notably and unexpectedly citing that silence and listening were necessary to their poignant works, contrary to what one normally expects of the author or artist: namely, explaining, telling. These artists create the kind of tales that are meditative yet completely accessible, all while being exquisitely rendered. Their reverence for the lost art of attentive listening—standing in sharp contrast to the rampant whirlwind of self-referential narratives—was refreshing. And with that, Ames signaled the finale of the event by doing a closing, piercing hairy call.