Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Understanding Comics

            It was a relief to finally read a textbook that wasn’t a textbook. It made sense to make a comic explaining how comics worked. The whole time I was reading this I was thinking of my high school science textbooks, how they would have pages of text then a few small photos to illustrate what was in the text, I never understood what the hell was being said. The images were few and far between so a lot of it was left to my imagination, which isn’t good for science class. Usually imagination is good for comics, this book actually tells you its good, but for explaining the structure of them this more “black and white” format worked best. Every panel explained what was being told with simple sentences and images. It made it really clear and easy to read and understand. It was a long comic but I actually got a lot out of it, every page was something useful and the use of all the images made it more clear. I’m really glad we had to read this because I had no understanding of comics, now I have an understanding of different styles of illustration, how the panels are laid out, how transitions are meant to be filled with your imagination, and how sounds effects can be written. This book was really helpful, I need to keep referencing this booth throughout the semester to help me with our other readings. 

Sunday, October 2, 2011

The Arrival


This was the first wordless novel I have ever read. At first I wasn’t sure how to approach it but after flipping through the pages briefly I found that it was much more interesting to read a novel with no true script. I took my time reading each panel and creating my own story. The style of illustration made it very enjoyable to look through and read, how some pages were one large illustration while others had a dozen or so small ones. In particular one of my favorite pages was when the man was traveling on the boat, Shaun showed the transition of time by illustrating over a dozen clouds on a single page. I even like how he cheated and made his own language. It remained a wordless novel because they weren’t really words; they were more like clues that helped you understand the story more. Even though the creatures were unrecognizable and the city was like nothing I have ever seen, I still knew what the story was about, or at least I thought I did since I made me own interpretation of it. The man left his family and home country and immigrated to the new world where he lived alone and found jobs so he could save money for his family to eventually come to the new world. It’s a story about overcoming a new obstacle and in the end his family comes to live with him in the new world and the very last image is his daughter teaching a new immigrant the language. I felt that I have more of an appreciation for comics after reading this story because this was like a true art in a comic form, and I really enjoyed the fact that I could write my own script to go with the images so I could use my imagination more.