Week Four: The Comic Book

            Comic books were created as a result of high demand for comic strips – but with an extended narrative. Artists since can pace out their story to their liking, and further continue it book by book.

            I’ve read Herge’s The Black Island, the first I’ve read out of any of Tintin’s adventures, and the only one available at the library. I was unfamiliar with the story and Tintin’s purpose. Considering that, and the fact that The Black Island was 7^th of the series, I still do not know what was really going on. The narrative I saw in The Black Island was fast-paced and engaging, plus it was funnier than I expected. Herge’s method of immersing his characters in realistic environments gave me the feeling that I’ve traveled far with them.

Week 3: The Comic Strip

            The comic strip, in its beginning, was celebrated as an efficient, innovative, and visually pleasing method of carrying a narrative. As comic strips became known in the late 19^th century, they were used to express the jumble of unfamiliar cultures entering the United States, as well as conflict between rich and poor. 

R.F. Outcault's The Yellow Kid

            As with any form of art, comics have evolved over time. As Max Ernst was assembling collages for Une Semaine de Bonte, the Surrealist movement was taking place, in which Ernst is a key artist. The premise of the Surrealist movement was to reveal contradictions in everyday life, by way of the unconscious and subconscious.

Week 2: Understanding Comics

While reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, I was most interested in the segment analyzing how realism and cartoons differ, as well as how they borrowed from each other in graphic novels. McCloud explains how the artwork and characters become an extension of the reader, by developing a system of relatable icons that are abstracted by stripping them down to specific details. When live-action films adopt this method into their art direction, they can bear a resemblance to cartoons. The iconic film The Wizard of Oz was observed as an example of this practice. I would also consider the 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine an example as well: all the protagonists are simplified (but not flat) and they each have one goal that is resolved, and one goal that they all share and fulfill together.

Olive from Little Miss Sunshine, center, upon realizing her goal of winning a regional child beauty pageant may be threatened by her over-sexualized contestants

McCloud further elaborates how humans relate to cartoons and objects, explaining how our brains are hard-wired to detect pattern recognition, specifically that of human faces. All it takes to make the connection is a simplified eye or two, and a line to symbolize a mouth. The “smiley face” is universally recognized as human or as a human face, despite it lacking almost all vital components of a human face, and the fact that this face is usually disembodied. This icon may be highly relatable, but it failed to humanize Wal-Mart as it represented the corporation's biggest selling point from the mid-90s to the mid-00s.

“The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled…an empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel in another realm. We don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it!”

-Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

On the other hand, cartoons that acquire characteristics of realism have their concepts as cartoons traded for an appearance that the reader can perceive as “having life.” A cartoon drawn realistically assumes a different identity than the icon, being depicted with every detail available, instead of preserving only a few specific traits. In hand-drawn media, combining cartoons and realism blurs the line between seeing and being.