It was thanks to the print that Dickens became a comic 
writer. He began as a provider of copy for a popular cartoonist. 
To consider the comics here, after “The Print,” is to fix 
attention upon the persistent print-like, and even crude 
woodcut, characteristics of our twentieth-century comics. It is 
by no means easy to perceive how the same qualities of print 
and woodcut could reappear in the mosaic mesh of the TV 
image. TV is so difficult a subject for literary people that it has 
to be approached obliquely. From the three million dots per 
second on TV, the viewer is able to accept, in an iconic grasp, 
only a few dozen, seventy or so, from which to shape an image. 
The image thus made is as crude as that of the comics. It is for 
this reason that the print and the comics provide a useful 
approach to understanding the TV image, for they offer very 
little visual information or connected detail. Painters and 
sculptors, however, can easily understand TV, because they