Berlin: Page 207

So I just realized that I have not posted on Jason Lutes's Berlin: City of Stones yet. My first impressions of this graphic novel were good- I enjoy the fact that the narrative skips around so frequently, and I feel like I can open the book to nearly any page and get an overall perception of what is happening and how Lutes wants his readers to understand the overall aura of the place and time.

Reading through the end of the book, I was particularly interested in the transitions used on page 207. While I do not have McCloud's book in front of me at the moment, I believe that Lutes uses an aspect-to-aspect transition in the first two panels, action-to-action transitions in the middle panels, and moment-to-moment transitions to end the page.

This creative use of transitions creates a dynamic effect in which the reader, through the transitions, experiences the way that the situation begins to slow down for the man who is shot when he realizes he is dying. The page begins with chaos (aspect-to-aspect), slows down a bit once the man realizes he is shot (action-to-action transitions depicting the man falling), and slows to a crawl as we experience the man's death from his own visual perspective (moment-to-moment).

The way the paneling begins to disappear as the man dies (and the following pages) gives the reader the impression that Lutes's story does not end here, creating interest in any coming graphic novels. I also appreciated the creative use of paneling in which the man's head is separated from the portion of his body with the bullet wound. This is as if to say the man cannot believe he has actually just been shot; the deadly physical nature of the situation is not, at first, believable. This makes the following action on the page even more dramatic.

Palestine: First Impressions

Awesome. I love the way Joe Sacco's graphic novel makes me work hard to get through the story. The way the text boxes and bubbles are strewn all over each page and even sometimes intertwined really gives the reader a challenge, but this challenge seems well worth it because the story is so interesting and pertinent, and the artwork is probably my favorite since Blankets (although I have not found anything we have read since nearly as interesting and inspiring). I also love the creative use of paneling. Pages 6-9 are great examples of creative diagonal panels that actually forced me to rotate the novel as I was reading. I am only through book 1 at this point, but I am anxious to continue working through Palestine. 

Final Project Idea

While I am fairly excited to write an experimental essay on Fun Home and the significance of book historical elements in the enhancement of thematic content and meaning, I am still tossing at least one more idea around in my head. I may want to change my proposal and write an ethnographic essay on the construction of race in cartoons and other types of graphic narratives.

If a cartoon is not depicting a well-known figure of a given ethnicity, then it could be said that the shading of skin tone is one of the easiest methods of constructing race in images. However, if that skin tone was taken away, along with any shading representing hair color, I wonder if people would still be able to identify race very easily. My hypothesis is that they would, for the most part, be able to make these identifications. I can only assume that stereotypes have worked their way into the eyes, noses, and mouths of race-based cartoons.

I feel a good method of going about collecting data for this ethnographic essay would be to type entires such as "African American Cartoon" and "Asian Cartoon" into an online database (maybe Google Images or something like it) and using the first five images from each search as a control. If these images were traced without any shading in skin and hair and placed in random order on a page, one could ask a number of people to identify the ethnicities of the individuals depicted in the images. One could then formulate an argument regarding the construction of race through elements other than skin and hair color.

Fun Home & Book History

In my opinion, the references to major literary works, the marginalia, and the glosses that can be found in Fun Home are some of the major factors that really make this graphic novel stand out in my mind because they emphasize the importance of book history and textuality within the text itself. I am currently taking a class called "Tangible Textuality" in which we discuss how textual elements such as marginalia and glosses, as well as material form, can work to enhance or emphasize meanings within the thematic content of the text itself. Page 28 is a wonderful example of the ways book historical elements can enhance meaning. It shows an excerpt from "Camus' first novel," a bird watching guide with marginalia added, and an "IMPORTANT MESSAGE" slip with handwriting. Bechdel uses all of these elements to enhance meaning in Fun Home while also calling attention to the importance of book history. She has even pointed out an important passage of Camus' novel through her use of color. Not only does Bechdel use glosses and marginalia as elements within the action of the actual narrative, but she adds her own glosses to emphasize meanings that are important within the narrative as a whole. The boxes pointing to various objects in the frames that simply identify those objects are also glosses put into the graphic novel by Bechdel herself.

Fun Home: First Impressions

My first thoughts while reading the first chapter of Fun Home were that the title of this graphic novel is supposed to be ironic because everything about Bechdel's home and family seems loveless and dreary. Even the color scheme, with its blue-grays, is capable of bringing out an intense sense of melancholy. Although it is hard to say why, I believe the color scheme works very well for the material in an aesthetic sense, better than a black and white or full-color color scheme would have. 

Despite its dismal tone, at least in the opening chapters, Bechdel was able to keep me interested through her elevated use of language in description and her fine attention to detail. It is as if her way of describing certain things is as precise and intense as her father's attention to detail in his home. In this way, it could be argued that she shares this commonality with her father after his death, despite the fact that she claims to hate this trait of his early in the story. My favorite attentions to detail come in the form of boxes with arrows pointing out small details of the frames that hold relevance to the tale. My personal favorite is on page 39, and it points out the "permanent grease stain from my dead grandfather's vitalis."    

The Mini-Comic as a Group Project

Let me start by saying that I absolutely hate working on group projects for many of the reasons we mentioned in class: I usually like to come up with my own ideas so I can remain interested in what I'm working on, I don't appreciate it when others try to take on a position of authority, and the final product resulting from such group work is usually not so great in comparison to tasks taken on individually. I remember having to write a group research paper on animal life in Asia a couple semesters ago, and despite the fact that I tried to make that paper as stylistically uniform as possible, different sections still felt very disconnected, and we ended up with a B.

That being said, the mini-comic is a much more appropriate assignment for working in a group context. My reasoning for this is that there are a number of elements that come with constructing a comic book different enough from one another that they can be taken on by different people and brought together at the end without creating a sense of disconnect. In my group, for example, which consisted of two people, we both collaborated on the story we were trying to tell, I took on the task of creating the artwork, and my partner completed all the lettering. These final two tasks were performed individually but did not create a strong sense of disconnect because they are different enough from one another that they did not clash in any significant ways.

That's the beauty of multimodal group projects. If people are responsible for their own modes within that project, the sense of disconnect becomes weaker. Other groups had a member responsible for shading, and even lettering and the actual words of the story could be taken on seperately from one another. For these reasons, I believe the mini-comic was probably one of the most successful group projects of which I have ever been a part.

Mini Comic Art

So I figured that representation would probably be the most difficult part of creating our mini-comic on George Washington saving America. This was due to the fact that we needed to incorporate a lot of characters that are easily recognizable in the media at the present (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, George Bush, and Dick Cheney). I do not consider myself to be an especially talented artist, so I was definitely concerned when I offered to do all the art for the comic. However, I think I came to a decent solution that ending up giving the comic additional visual meaning in a good way.

I looked up a number of random political cartoons on Google images and based my drawings of these characters on those political cartoons. I feel that the fact that the characters are based on their depictions in previous political cartoons really comes across when paying attention to the artwork. Since political cartoons, 90% of the time, critique political figureheads in a major way, the way they are represented in our mini-comic gives the reader an additional sense of critique on these characters. The fact that Gerge Washinton is drawn so simply in comparison helps make this more noticable. And of course I had to make Rupert Murdoch look a bit like Hitler, because he deserves it.