Visual Storytelling: A Comparative Study of Iranian Visual Arts and Comic Strips

A story can be expressed both through text and images. If the story is expressed with images, then it is called a comic strip. By comic strip is meant a sequence of drawings that mostly include text or captions. Although, in western art, the comic strip is not very old, yet its origin can be found in cave paintings and ancient Egypt paintings. This article studies   Persian paintings to show that the comic strip can be found in this kind of painting as well.  To this aim it investigates the similarities and differences between comic strips and Persian paintings. The hypothesis is that Persian paintings and comic strips are similar in their type of storytelling but different in their methods of illustration. The methodology is a study on some Persian miniatures, looking at changes through historical periods.