The comic strip

I found the most interesting thing about the sample of comic strips we looked at were no only diverse in style, format but also storytelling.  A lot of this beginning comics seemed to paving the way for later types of comics so to speak.  While Little Nemo and Gasoline Alley concentrated more on environment and atmosphere, using clean uniform panel combined with brilliant composition created a real sense of a world.  I feel like this might have laid it’s way for comics that are very world heavy and the idea of really using the panel composition in neat way. Meanwhile things like Krazy Kat seemed lay the way for messier odder stranger stuff later on.  Then later comics like Peanuts and Clavin and Hobbes  which started a more character based storytelling, things that are not sickly sweet or super wacky but are somewhere in between both of these seemed to have given way to more different, more sublet kinds of jokes and storytelling. I think a lot entrainment,  not just comics has to take a bow to these early strips as path builder to many many different kinds of visual storytelling .

  

Understanding Comics-Scott McCloud Post

So I was pretty familiar with Scott McCloud's work,  I have a copy of "Making Comics" that he wrote after "Understanding Comics". I've had that book since late middle school so I've read it though a few times at different points of my life. while a lot of it went over my 14 year old head at the time, I still consider it a good read now.

  Now "Understanding Comic" is a little different since it's more understanding how comics work as a concept rather that how to they "work" per say.  It seemed to me, to be very wordy and hard to understand at times. A lot of this stuff to my brain comes as second nature as someone who has read comics though most of my life.  So it took me back to read some of the stuff about things like panel to panel transitions. The fact that things happen in between panels or that they change seemed obvious but seeing it laid out some helpful and got me to think about how panels work and how people viewed it without a lifetime of comic reading.  The part about the idea of "cartooning" as a way of seeing or as presenting an idea or concept. At first read I founded this kind of hard to comprehend. Of course the lines and shape made by ink and pencil are simply abstracts of reality but I'm not sure if our connection with them are compactly self made, if that makes sense. The panels about how if you look at the realist drawing of a face you see another face but when you see a cartoon face you see yourself made sense to me but I have a hard time figuring why that made sense to me.
 

The Arrival

This may be a tad bias consisting that I enjoy wordless storytelling especially in comic form. The Arrival does a fantastic job at telling a deep and full story with any words.  The Arrival has a specific format that goes from many small square panels on a page to large full spare illustration. The square panels usually don’t feature much. Often times the action in limited from panel to panel. Sometimes it can just be small intimate things like hand gestures or a short conversation. This gets us as the reader up close and personal with our main character as they immigrate and learn to live in a strange new place. The small illustrations give a close look at his life, mannerism and day-to-day life.  Now the beautiful large sweeping spares depicting the cityscape do an amazing job showing us what this strange and new world is like. The drawings are extremely well done with a lot of details and atmosphere. The fantasy city our main character travels to is almost like a dream, everything is big and new and other worldly.  In fact they can be a little overwhelming at times.  The fantasy like quality to the city the man moves to help us feel as blown away and unfamiliar as the man, just as he is taking in and learning about all the new things around this world, so are we.  This works so much better then setting it in a somewhere readers would recognize things that we know. In this would everything to us is just as new as it is from the man. The format does a great job at letting us feel as the character is feeling, from small moments with other people to big overwhelming feelings of wonder and loneliness.   All the clear images, the passage of times, the big shots of the city create a beautiful story all without the need of a single word.