Week 2: Understanding Comics

While many diverse and fascinating topics were brought up in McCloud’s  Understanding Comics, I found that one of my favorites involved the cartoon. I’ve always assumed a cartoon was just an animation with catchy visuals and stylized, and usually simplified, designs for their characters, etc. The concept of a cartoon is more so used as a term meaning to simplify something so it’s easier to understand and push the story to an idea to the broader audience in a way that doesn’t lose their attention. This is something that’s carried over to comics pretty heavily, and it’s why cartoons have such a high appeal.

McCloud discusses how we are attracted to cartoons because of their simplicity and how their visuals allow us to see ourselves. I thought this was cool to read because it brings up a lot of interesting ideas about identity and visual awareness that is connected to these “cartoons” that we watch or read. The cartoon, as McCloud said, is a vacuum in which the viewer’s identity and awareness is pulled into it. Whether identifying with a character, object, etc. we the audience put ourselves into what we’re taking in.

           

As discussed before McCloud brought up how people see themselves and concepts within cartoons/comics. We put relatable images and experiences into our work after all so it’s not far-fetched to think that so many cartoons and comics are easy for the general audience to throw themselves into to understand what they’re reading better.

The visual style of the cartoon is also incredibly popular in comics due to it’s simplicity compared to realism, ability to create many visuals which are easy to read, a multitude of different styles you can draw out, etc. The cartoon also get’s ideas across really quick. Take for example the usual comics in the Sunday paper. The comic panels are simple and easy to read and whether or not they contain the scenes or ideas presented are easy to understand thanks to well chosen images and a simplified style.

Week 1: "The Arrival" by Shaun Tan

When most people think of graphic novels they probably imagine many of the comic book volume paperbacks or hardcovers you can find amongst the shelves in many book stores which are littered with colorful visuals and tons of dialogue bubbles to read. Many visual novels rely on a combination of images and speech boxes to help tell their story but not a lot truly rely on imagery alone.

            The Arrival by Shaun Tan is a magical little graphic novel whose beautiful visuals tell the story of a man and his family who’ve immigrated to a new, strange land. While the visuals alone are striking and wonderfully drawn, what makes Tan’s novel so well done is the fact that he relies on visuals to tell his story. There isn’t one piece of dialogue anywhere.

            Tan’s detailed and carefully drawn out panels each show scenes that help rely the story to the reader through the character’s actions, important objects, visual focal points, showing specific events, etc. It is through what is seen that you understand what is going on in the story and it’s so well done that you can quickly gather what’s going on in each panel. Not one word of dialogue was needed.

            What also makes The Arrival such a great visual novel is that uses bizarre visuals to depict how everything the main character is experiencing is something new and almost otherworldly. The whole novel is a visual metaphor of how truly alien it is to come to a new country. Despite how odd the visuals become it’s still easy for the reader to follow along and understand what’s going on in the story. This is especially true for when the main character meets and talks to new people. We are shown a few panels that give a backstory to these characters and while the imagery is strange or outlandish at times we still understand the meaning behind what’s being shown to us without any dialogue.

            The method of relying on visuals also lends a better connection to the main character and an understanding of what its like to come to a new country whose language and culture you don’t understand. You have to rely on what you see, now what you can hear or read.

            The Arrival is a fantastic story and is a beautiful testament to the wonder of a purely visual graphic novel. I could only hope for more novels like it.