 In essence, the use of images to tell stories, as in movies, TV or cartoons, relies upon the same powerful techniques since Antiquity. Cuneiform, the world s oldest writing, sets in the world oldest and long greatest city, Uruk in early Mesopotamia (southern Iraq), the oldest recorded story, the still told Gilgamesh epic. As every great story it has a hero, defined by the events and his spiritual and moral ability to respond to them. The Assyrian (northern Iraq) king Assurbanipal had it transposed from -then no longer legible- cuneiform to images, only starring himself in four relief sculptures in his Ninive palace, as a mini-cartoon about the lion hunt, and added far more with thousands of  extra characters  about his victorious war against the Elamites, an intrigue complete with side-plots. The missing element, emotion, came with the Greek mythological sculptures, notably since Homer s Odysseia.