Technolandy

Day 148b (of 2025/26) in space nobody can hear you… – a wordless graphic novel: Viewfinder by D.U. Chung and Salwa Majoka ( @dudechung & @salwa.majoka )

I’ve been loving hearing reactions to wordless graphic novels. We’ll actually be exploring this in a session at our upcoming Comic Con.

My librarian daughter highly recommended Viewfinder when I asked if she had ideas for stories without words for a couple of students we work with. She’d caught the end of a presentation at Toronto Comic Arts Festival and apparently made a beeline to the artist floor to grab a copy.

I get it.

The artwork is beautiful. Dystopian. Atmospheric. No words to trip over, but still rich with opportunities for questioning, connecting, inferring, and synthesizing. A picture tells a thousand words… and sometimes asks a thousand questions too.

There are beautiful allusions woven throughout too. Echoes of Where the Wild Things Are, hints of The Little Prince, and likely more that I missed on first read.

Wordless novels can still stir debate in literacy circles. Is it “reading” when your brain isn’t decoding printed text?

That opens up one of those wonderfully messy literacy conversations: audiobooks, oral storytelling, verse vs. prose, independent vs. instructional reading levels, and what we actually mean when we say reading.

For me, story is story.

And while moving through this one, my brain was doing all the work good reading demands: questioning, connecting, inferring, synthesizing… all while taking in a stunning visual narrative.

Safe to say this is the start of more than a couple wordless graphic novels finding their way into our comic book library.