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.

Stuck Rubber Baby: Page Layout

Again, as I continue to read Stuck Rubber Baby, I am so glad we are done with Alan Moore and back into the realm of the realistic. The emotional impact of Cruse's novel is almost as great as the impact Blankets (one of my new "favorite books" on facebook) had on me. Then again, maybe that's because I've been listening to Tupac's "Changes" on a regular basis for the past few days. Anyways...

The way that Cruse lays out some of his pages is fascinating. I believe the opening page of chapter ten (p. 76) is extremely well done. In the background of the page's upper left corner there is an image of Toland looking in at Russell Park, his back to the reader as if he is trapped outside the park, which represents a fight against prejudice, but wants to be let in. In the foreground of the same image is another picture of Toland, this time his face visible to the reader. While this second image of Toland also displays the same sort of longing to be on the other side of the fence, the fence also obstructs his image and gives the reader the sense that Toland's sexuality acts as an entrapment. Directly below this image is a third image of Toland, this time in his present state telling the story directly to the audience. This third image of Toland is placed in front of the fence acting as the younger Toland's cage, representing Toland's eventual capacity to come to terms with his sexuality and escape the feelings of entrapment it causes him. Overall, the way Cruse works with the two images of the fence and the multiple images of Toland in such a symbolic way emphasizes they way that multimodal texts can use images to create additional meanings. Well done, Mr. Cruse!

Stuck Rubber Baby- First Impressions

Again, this is the sort of graphic novel I think I prefer- the kind that focuses on realistic situations and personal issues at an intimate level. I read Howard Cruse's "Acknowledgments" at the end of the novel, and I was surprised to learn that the book is a work of fiction. The realistic quality of the situations in Stuck Rubber Baby is enhanced by the detailed manner with which Cruse describes his characters and their interests, and I assume it would be easy for any reader to think they were reading an illustrated memoir. I have to give major props for that sort of intricacy.

The reading is a bit slower, as the lettering is small and there's a lot of it, but I have to admit I love the way Cruse chooses to bold certain words in almost every text bubble. Just as a poet might use meter to emphasize certain words within a line of verse, Cruse's choice to make certain words bold works to enhance the overall meaning taken away from a single bubble. Maybe I'll elaborate on this using a specific panel for my next post...

Now this is more like it...

I have to say that reading through two of Allen Moore's graphic novels right in a row was a bit of a chore. After reading Blankets, which was one of the more enjoyable works I've ever read for a class at U of I, entering the world of politics and super heroes was sort of a downer. Maybe I just find it easier to relate to things that pertain more obviously to the actual world, cognitive estrangement aside. While I can see how V for Vendetta is easily related to some aspects of America's current political state, I have to say that my deep interest in politics and even some political "conspiracy theories" related to the CFR, New World Order, NAFTA Superhighway, and Security and Prosperity Partnership make me interested in how a country allows itself to become a fascist state, not the problems with fascism itself.

But along comes David Collier's Portraits from Life, with its intense focus on actual personal histories, and I am enjoying the reading again. My favorite two portraits thus far have been of Ethel Catherwood and Grey Owl. Not only have I not heard of these individuals before, but their stories are fairly interesting. My interest in these stories mainly stems from their endings. Collier's depiction of Catherwood at the end of the first portrait is good for a laugh because it seems strange that someone who made such a seemingly profound impact on the world of track and field would become a bitter recluse. I found it similarly funny when Grey Owl punched a man in the face and stated "I'll show you who's a fucking faker!" While these individuals represent important aspects of history and made impacts on the world, they still have their own personal problems to deal with. They are not perfect, and their imperfections are what make them interesting.

V For Vendetta: Between the Panels

Some of my favorite moments in V For Vendetta were moments in which no dialogue was occuring. In Understanding Comics, McCloud discussed having to read between the panels through recognizing different types of transitions, and Moore uses a number of these transitions in V for Vendetta that I believe added to the overall enjoyment I took away from the graphic novel. Unlike Blankets, which used a variety of creatively drawn panels to create meaning, the majority of panels in Moore's book are rectangular in shape, so it is easy to read the lettering while ignoring the visual aspect of the text. However, when no lettering is present for pages at a time, the reader is forced to try to understand the story solely from a visual standpoint, something a graphic novel can acheive that many other modes of writing cannot.

Page 77 of V For Vendetta is a page without lettering that uses multiple types of panel transitions. The page starts with a moment-to-moment transition in which the first two panels are nearly identical drawings of a gun. The third and fourth panels contain a subject-to-subject transition, and the rest of the panels are action-to-action transitions. The uses of these transitions in this order builds a momentum throughout the course of the page without the use of dialogue. Also, the very last portion of the book, entitled Vincent, contains no lettering at all; the entire four pages tell a story through drawings only, and it could be argued that every type of transition McCloud discusses is used other than non-sequitur transitions. It's cool moments like these that really make graphic novels stand out as a legitimate art form.

A Rant on Ranting

Ok, so I just finished writing my manifesto, and I have to say it was an extremely enjoyable experience. Ranting is something I love to do in my spare time anyway, so having the opportunity to do it as an assignment was fun indeed! Normally it takes me a long while to write essays, but the manifesto encourages a sort of stream-of-consciousness that essays do not permit, and I finished the assignment in record time, feeling like I could have ranted for at least a few more pages.

Having the opportunity to write in a number of formats has been a fairly rewarding experience. The blog, the wiki, the manifesto- while I am used to writing critical essays, I have found experimenting with these other modes of communication to be a good experience overall. In my manifesto, which discusses comics in relation to the writing process, I make the claim that students should be required to make comics of their own in order to think critically about using multimodal formats to create meaning that words alone cannot. For this reason, I am looking forward to the upcoming comic-creation assignment. Hopefully it will be as rewarding as I claim it will be in my manifesto.

A Short Observation on Color

I guess I never really thought about it until McCloud mentioned it in Understanding Comics, but I don't think I ever fully realized how important bright primary colors are to comics. This is probably because I spent my entire childhood obsessing over Spawn comics, which tend to be very dark, but even Spawn has his iconic bright red cape. Looking back over the old Wonder Woman comics on our wiki, I am noticing that bright reds, yellows, greens and blues make up the primary color scheme of the comics. I find McCloud's argument that these bright color schemes work to promote comics over the numbing black and white newspaper print interesting, but I can't decide if I completely agree. It must be more complicated than that considering the two genres are being tailored to two different audiences. However, I have to admit that the bright primary colors used in some comics have probably significantly helped some super heros (Superman for example) become the cultural icons they are today.

Wonder Wiki

I must admit that the reason I was so quick to raise my hand and volunteer to be in the Wonder Woman wiki group was because I thought it might be easier than some of the other categories. Detective Comics seemed to carry a pretty large scope of material, and there are so many primary characters in X-Men that I figured it would take forever to provide information on all of them. I figured Wonder Woman, on the other hand, is only a single character, so maybe it wouldn't be too hard to grasp all of the information related to her. I was wrong.

First of all, I had no idea before working on the wiki that Wonder Woman is related to Greek mythology. Trying to remember all of the Greek Gods, immortals, and their stories was hard enough in previous classes I have taken, but having to remember them as being part of the backstory to a very complex comic book series is definitely difficult. Previously, I had no idea that Wonder Woman was an Amazon, or that a number of individuals had taken on her role, Hippolyta and Diana being the most prominent. My concept of "the super hero" up until this point (the main references for this concept being Spawn and Batman) had been that "he" was a single individual looking to do harm to villains.

Wonder Woman, on the other hand, is very different in what I believe is a positive way. She carries no weapons that would inflict harm upon her enemies. Rather, she uses "tools" such as her bullet-deflecting bracelets and lasso of truth to promote honesty, empathy, and peaceful coexistence among all people and nations- not something I expected to find in a comic, especially since violence has been so prominent in the comics and comicbook movies I have seen. Despite the fact that I am not accustomed to such material, I find it very admirable and enjoyed researching it very much.

Understanding Comics: Chapters 5-6

Chapter 5 of Understanding Comics begins with a number of somewhat abstract illustrations meant to suggest various emotions. However, I wonder if I would have picked up on the same emotions if McCloud had not labeled them. The frames conveying serenity, pride, intimacy, and anxiety were especially confusing, so I’m glad McCloud decided to add question marks after all his proposed emotions and senses.

Chapter 6 gave me a better understanding of what McCloud was doing with his emotion and sense panels. He seems to be using duo-specific panels in an attempt to make his representations of nonphysical characteristics clearer.

When McCloud first discussed duo-specific panels, I figured there was little or no artistic use for them. I’ve taken a number of creative writing workshops, and “show, don’t tell” is always one of the primary rules discussed by instructors. Naturally I was inclined to believe that showing and telling at the same time would influence the comic in a negative way (I was definitely annoyed by the examples McCloud gives on page 153). However, when it comes to senses and emotions (as it does in chapter 5), duo-specific panels do seem like they can be justified. I will be interested in seeing if any of the graphic novels we read use this specific combination in a particularly effective way.

Blankets: Chapters 8-9

I found it strange that so many people did not enjoy Blankets as we were discussing it in class the other day. I personally loved it and was confused as to why such animosity was present. Some claimed that the novel’s overall content was not interesting enough to fully justify the level of egocentricity it transmits. I disagree.

Maybe I am partial to Craig’s story because I find it so easy to correlate it to my own life, but I did not find Craig’s experiences in church and church camp and his relationship with Raina to be as inconsequential as others seemed to believe. Some people gave the impression that they did not believe the book had an underlying thesis to warrant its length and subject matter. However, I believe Craig’s final monologue in chapter 9 brings everything together.

He spends so much time worrying about his religion and his relationship with Raina that he doesn’t realize how insignificant those things are in the grand scheme of his life. His obsessive nature doesn’t allow him to look beyond his immediate reality. In the end, however, even holidays with family are reduced to mnemonic device. While Craig will always remember his religious experiences and Raina, he refuses to let them control his life in the way they once did.           

Blankets & Understanding Comics Chapter 3

During one of our first class sessions we discussed the purpose of the frames used on page 52 of Blankets, in which Craig is shown changing from a child to a high school student as he falls through clouds. At least two parts of Craig’s maturing body are in each of the three frames, and therefore Craig’s body must infiltrate what McCloud calls the gutters between the three frames.

While McCloud states that gutters are the locations where reader imagination is supposed to fill in any empty spaces in the narrative, Thompson complicates the traditional use of gutters through allowing his characters to break into them. On page 52, therefore, a reader may mentally fill in whatever events he desires into Craig’s life between the frames, but Craig’s ability to escape the frames adds an additional level of fluidity to the page and to what might have otherwise been an awkward transition from childhood to high school.

I also appreciate Thompson’s use of both moment-to-moment and aspect-to-aspect transitions within short amounts of space. In chapter 7, for instance, moment-to-moment transitions are used as Raina falls asleep, signifying Craig’s strong attentiveness to Raina’s physical features. Shortly after this, Thompson uses aspect-to-aspect transitions to show a number of features of the landscape, including snowdrifts and leafless trees. The aspect-to-aspect transitions place Raina and Craig within a rather barren landscape, making the moment-to-moment transitions seem even more important through increasing the reader’s sense of Craig’s fascination with Raina.

Blankets: Chapters 2-5

While reading Blankets, I have come to appreciate the artwork more and more because of the correlations I find between Craig’s experiences and my life. I feel the simplistic facial features Thompson uses emphasizes McCloud’s position that more basic character drawings allow those viewing the drawings to project themselves onto the drawn characters. Since I find strong personal correlation between Craig’s life and my own in terms of being scolded for creative works, religion, and even Craig’s relationship with Raina, I am already invested in the story itself, but my ability to see myself as Craig due to Thompson’s relatively rudimentary facial drawings has increased my level of investment. Since the novel deals with such common but deeply emotional subjects (divorce, religion and its relation to sex, bullying) and uses simple facial constructions, I can understand why some have read through the entire novel in one sitting. McCloud also states, however, that simple character features cause one to focus more on the words that are being spoken by those characters. For this reason, I find it interesting that many pages of Blankets seem to have little or no dialogue or text at all (pages 256-258 for example).

Blankets: Chapter One

Last semester I took a course on writing processes and pedagogies in which we discussed multimodality often, especially as it relates to fonts, images, visual transitions, etc. One of the reasons I am taking this course is to work more with images as they relate to text, which also prompted me to take a course called "Tangible Textuality" this semester. There were a couple of images that caught my eye in the first chapter of Craig Thompson's Blankets. I noticed a strong correlation between the final image of Phil in "the cubby hole" on page 17 and the final two images of Craig on page 25. The markings left by the brothers' hands on the door and mirror represent two different modes of entrapment, Phil being physically trapped in "the cubby hole" and Craig being trapped in a life he does not want for himself. Escapism seems like it will play a large role in the novel, and I found it to be an absolute tragedy when Craig burned all of his artwork. I also appreciated the use of text, dialogue, and thought bubbles on page 53. Thompsons use of a thought bubble to block his teacher's words seems to imply that religion itself has become a new mode of escapism replacing artwork. I also found the content of the frame to be somewhat humorous, despite Craig's dismal situation.

I enjoyed the first two chapters of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, but I also found chapter two to be fairly confusing at times. I recognize and appreciate the echoes of Saussure, but I don't know if it's something I'm ready to tackle in my blog before we've had any class discussion on the material.