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."