Week #3: Little Nemo and Krazy Kat

For this week, we are to read Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland and George Herriman's Krazy Kat.

While reading Little Nemo, I noticed at the beginning of the serialization, each panel was accompanied by a numbered description that explained the context. Inside the panels, the characters interacted with each other, with balloons outlining speech, in pretty surreal settings and strange situations. Not unlike a dream sequence. Which is kind of the gist for Nemo stories.

Each chapter is a dream sequence in which Nemo is about to enter Slumberland, or is in it, but something stops him. He wakes up by the Sun that melts the gorgeous dream away.

I feel like it's trying to say the inevitable mornings and events he cannot control stop him from enjoying a better world. It's pretty sad, in a way. The chapters that follow that same formula: Dream sequence. Nemo wakes up. He's miserable.

Not always it occurs when he's sleeping, however. Nemo has quite the imagination, and seems to enact the fantastic odysseys in real life. For example:

I suppose the stories of Nemo are both hopeful and depressing realities of growing out of innocence.

George Herriman's Krazy Kat, on the other hand, is a slightly more disheveled comic. For the time, the layout wasn't as important to consider, so being critical on this aspect is unfair, however, I feel like Little Nemo had a clearer layout, having been published a decade earlire than Krazy Kat.

What this tells me is that Krazy Kat has a looser style; it's representative and iconic, based more on the figures telling the story than an actual narration (Little Nemo), with complementary dialogue between characters. The gist of the story is there is a cat that does reckless things, then the police catches him.

Week 2: Max Ernst's A Week of Kindness

A translation of what's going on. In the illustrations, men are depicted as roosters, stone heads and so on. Some sort of statement is being made about men, perhaps. There's a sense of urgency in most of the pictures, based on the poses of the female characters. The men are in various different positions of cruelty against these women; maybe representing the obscure side of masculinity. The women are mostly in distress. But the meaning of the pictures make little sense to me in sequence. They are non-sequitur at best.

The common theme is violence.

During "Thursday: Easter Island", some men are depicted as humans, while others are exaggerating their poses.

The pictures are easily readable because of the gestures, its story can be deduced in multiple ways, and they do not necessarily have to do with each other. They each stand on their own.

It is a surreal illustration that reminisces dreams and how it evokes the cultural context of humanity, which is violence and sex pictured together.

Photographing the collage is simile to Photoshop, by flattening  the image like we do with layers. He assembles the images to create a subjective image. 

Week #2 – Understanding Comics

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is an easy-to-digest introduction to comics. With its comic format, he directly demonstrates how layout of panels, spatial and time together, work to create a sequential art -- or in his detailed definition: "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence". His humor is also a hook to keep reading; the book doesn't feel like a lecture, more like an invitation to experience understanding.

Not only he covers the technical structure of a comic, but also its psychological aspect: its appeal and the reason he said "deliberate sequence". Because the story is an experience if the reader can put themselves into the character's shoes.

However, I think it really is a matter of taste when it comes to art style. He states that the more realistic the style is, the further away we are from immersion, and instead we become bystanders just like a cinematic experience. In my experience, I see myself in more elaborated scenery, such as in Takehiko Inoue's Vagabond than in, say, Garfield.

McCloud also emphasizes the difference in space and time depending on the text that accompanies each panel. In a wordless panel, the viewer can take in the details of the environment, the action and position of characters, as well as what they mean together. In some cases, wordless panels can be fast-paced because we take less time taking in details than reading text. It becomes a simultaneous experience. On the other hand, words slow time and divide the panel into different actions.

This is especially true in Hogarth's illustrations, where the details take time to consider, but we think of the scene as a simultaneous experience. You can see it in many ways from different angles and not know who started an action before the other. All characters are in the same level in actions, so the composition must be taken into account to understand the story. It's not explicitly linear, but there is a story that is understood in the historical context.

Maybe the first sequential art with morality.

If there were dialogue in his illustrations, then the meaning of the illustrations will change completely because then we would be forced into a linear understanding.

In short, the layout of comics is an important part in slowing or hastening the pace of the story. More panels drag because attention is focused on words and their meaning, while less panels shorten understanding time because they accommodate larger images with much more detail. 

Cartoonist Track:

What Understanding Comics also explains is that the pace of the story can be manipulated via "shots". Depending on the shots, the reader can tell where they are supposed to be, who they are meant to pay attention to, what mood we're to feel. Each panel should have a considered shot, a plan of composition, position and pose of the character, to guide the eye of the reader. I wanted there to be a peaceful mood, so I centered the character with minimal dramatic gesture, and gave less details in the background. A centered composition gives a sense of balance, while the lack of detail in the background gave the reader time to take in the meaningful details (such as pose and lines the characters).

The first panel is the establishing shot, and in order to give the reader some understanding, I gave the scene details. This helps the reader fill in the gaps in subsequent panels, because the reader already knows where the characters are supposed to be at.

McCloud also places importance in lighting, but I believe that depends on the graphic novel you're meaning to make. There are styles that do not require shading or values.

Lastly, the 4th panel is in a dutch angle, not because it's an action or unbalanced story beat, but because I wanted the short-haired girl to keep us grounded (vertical position). After all, we are looking from the short-haired girl's POV.

Week #1: Wordless Comics

Our first assignment is to read Shaun Tan's, The Arrival, a wordless comic that relies solely on the elements of composition, gesture and interesting details and designs for communication.

My first impression is that it is outstanding how Shaun Tan managed to convey precise information of what the characters need from each other and the environment. Communication in this graphic novel relies on the ingenuity of each panel, and this is definitely interesting to note and learn from.

The way he makes the communication get through, from what I've read, is through his careful decisions of shots in different panels. Each panel zooms further in or out, or has different gestures simile to the last panel, depending on what effect Tan desires to create in the atmosphere and mood. These slow changes in panels create a sort of "animation" if you will.

It tells us specifically what the character is doing without words. Now we can see the process step by step and appreciate the nuances of the character's personality and behavior, something one can only speculate if this happened in a single or couple of panels. It took him 9 panels to show the reader how he meticulously put the photo of his family away for safe-keeping. I feel like many of his choices are to focus on these seemingly ordinary objects because they are important to the story.

Because this is a story in the context of surrealism, many of the actions the characters act on should be jarring to the reader, right? However, Tan manages to create a sense of mundanity and ordinary life in this magnificent wordless world. For example, here's the main character starving and looking to buy food. We understand there's a some sort of misunderstanding because of the characters' facial expressions.

Consecutive storytelling between panels isn't necessarily done back-to-back. Another way he manages to convey mood and information is from seemingly distant images that connect emotionally with the character. In one page, he sits relaxed, staring at his family portrait, and imagines holding her daughter's hand. I can understand that because Tan takes the time to emphasize on what he and I should focus our attention to.

This page, however, is more abstract, bouncing from image to image. He came back home, after a long journey. We see the warm images that relate to a house, a family, the drawings of a child, coffee like we see in the first couple of pages before he left his home. When we see the family portrait, everything makes sense. And finally the father giving a coin to his daughter.