week 2: Understanding Comics

In Scott McCloud's "understanding Comics", one of the things that stuck out to me was the how we tend to see the human face in everything and can relate the simplest and most generic cartoon face to someone we know. Simply because as humans we want to create everything in our own image. And although we think we see ourselves in mirrors or photos, we have never actually seen ourselves, we notice small things like out hair or eye color, while others see the real us since we like to examine everything in small details.
 And because the simplest of details can mean so many things to the human eye, a cartoon that has no actual specific image can be related to basically half the planet even though the artist just intended it to be  one person based on a possible friend  or passerby. As the cartoon gains more detail people may lose interest because they can't relate the character to themselves or friends visually. We like to assign everything upon appearance and create a side story in our own minds, like the kind of person they are, or where they work, or even if they have a job. All based on the slightest image of a person. With the least amount of detail a lot disappears and our curiosity grows and the story becomes more interesting.

Week 1: Shaun Tan's The Arrival

Wordless comics have the innate ability to push past the spoken word by simply showing gestures through simple gestures towards something or someone, as well as the expression on characters faces. In Shaun Tan's "The Arrival", he was able to show a characters conversation with another, through multiple panels to show a gesture. Not using so many to show the exact movement like an animation but just enough to get the point across, so that the individual person could piece together the scene as it plays through.

Too little panels and the reader could lose interest quickly, the writer has to pick and choose which panels are vital to the story. Just like in films where each scene is carefully planned out, in the storyboarding precess, each scene had its camera angles and contrast and value drawn out perfectly, so that it felt easy to read, almost as if watching a film on tv. Interactions with other characters show the reader what kind of personality the main character has which would lead to, the almost certain mindset of how the character might react in another scene. The backgrounds of the panels were kept simple, as to not take the attention away from the focus of the scene, unless something was relevant in the moment in which the background would have more presence, like a change in scenery or location or even a flashback into the main characters past that would have ed him to this point. A characters expression is the main focus of the comic as you read, so you can gage which emotion you should feel like following their story. As humans we like to feel connected to things, so being able to jump into the story and understanding the emotions that could be swimming through this characters mind, makes us feel like we are part of the story in the long run. We also look for words on anything that could give us a clue, by having a the gibberish lettering on objects, it may confuses the reader for a moment but at the same time it could give them purpose to keep reading figure out the mystery of whats going on.