x FOREWORD 4 Joseph Heller created a visual timeline to help keep track of the action in Catch 22. 5 Vladimir Nabokov had to create a map of James Joyce’s Ulysses in order to follow the narrative. The list goes on. As students of lit- erature and imagination, did we ever know this? We did not. Strange, isn’t it? Pictures are the basis of our storytell- ing, but no one seems to want to admit it. Our verbal mind does not work without our visual mind. Those of us raised in the western educational tra- dition find that terrifying. Pictures trivialize, drawings are silly, doodles patronize, art is decoration. These are the things we’re told in school. In this marvelous book, Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio show us how wrong we are. Thinking in pictures is our nature. Sharing those pictures has long been our dream. With the arrival of global social media, we have a whole new set of tools to make that dream come true. Thank you, Ekaterina and Jessica, for showing us those tools. This is going to be fun. DAN ROAM San Francisco, 2013