Week 2: Understanding Comics

The graphic novel, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, gave the viewers a since of how written and conceptually visualized to create a good story. He uses this method by creating a comic with instructions.  Before reading this, I just saw comics as a form of storyboards and film/animation in slow motion. McCloud’s thesis on why we shouldn’t compare the two made a lot of sense. McCloud concludes that animation is sequential in time, but not separately juxtaposed as comics are. His biggest point on this subject varied from the context of frames in film occupying one space, and in the world of comics, the frames occupy a different space.  I get what he is saying, but in some aspects, as a film student, I disagree. He dose conclude some aspects of story in this novel. I feel that many graphic comics are conceptually related to storyboards in a way. They both are visually explaining the viewer of what is going on and the position in the frame explains the space. However, through McCloud’s variation on juxtaposed visual art, I can see what he is going for. He thoroughly explains how every image has to come with some form of subtext, where in film, we get subtext through the story, action, and dialogue, but comics have to be juxtaposed to clarify a conception of visual art.

Overall, my one of my favorite context from this was the perception of Icons in comics and how we see the things around us in the juxtaposed art.  He shows how that that the more we abstract our images, the more we are pushing way from the real making the image more acceptable to our eyes.

Week 1: The Arrival

After reading Shaun Tan’s visual novel “The Arrival”, one could say that this piece of work was one of the most conceptional masterpieces in history. This novel brings the viewer into the work and story. It gives the viewer/reader a state of mind of being in the story. It is like the viewer is looking inside what is going on in the story and personally experiencing what the characters are going through. Some might even imply that the viewer may even become the character. The concept visual literature work in The Arrival shows how to tell a story effectively without using motion or dialogue. The viewer can bring together what is going on as far as the situations, current events, and character relationship through the visual imagery. Each illustration was effective and symbolic towards the story. Within each image the viewer could tell and fell what was going on through the powerful detail. As a filmmaker, at first, I was going through this story as if the images were storyboards. The images to me were set up like shots in a film, but these were a little more detailed then your average storyboards. These images were like frames within a film, which were what created the story. I felt as if I was watching a silent film through the illustrations.

     As for the story itself, I think that it was effective and had a lot of concepts. I could tell that the characters were in danger from the beginning of the story. The family moving away from the dangerous city and trying to get away from what appeared to be a monster showed me the protagonist and antagonist parts of the story. I could also visual tell what the characters goals where. This story also came with the elements of the hero’s journey which causes the protagonist to leave the threshold and go out to adventure the world to seize the reward and become a new person. There was the mentor, which were the man and child in the middle of the story.

Overall, I think that this piece opened many doors for not only visual literatures such as comics, but films, written novels, and animation.