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Showing posts from September, 2019

Understanding Comics

While I was on the fence about whether I liked the comic as a whole I did find some of Scott McCloud's ideas quite interesting. I didn't always agree with his opinion but with his ideas of reading in between the gutters of the panels that actually contain all of the action I definitely agreed with him.  In some circumstances there’s an action that happens in between two panels and it’s up to us as the readers to use context clues and logic to piece together what happened. In a lot of cases it’s simple things that we do everyday or fairly often to which in turn our brain automatically understands the action that happened in space of the gutter to get us to the next panel’s action or scene.  An example of this would be the two panels of the man sleeping and there’s a spider on the blanket and then in the next panel the spider is in a different spot even closer to the man sleeping. Our minds naturally put two and two together and come up with the conclusion that the spider mu

The Arrival

I actually really enjoyed reading the comic of "The Arrival" by Shaun Tan. At a first glance I was a little apprehensive just because there were so many pages but as soon as I got into it I was hooked. I didn't mind how many pages there were because the story was intriguing to me.  I actually enjoyed that there were no words in the comic and it was simply pictures. I think one of my favorite pages was the one with all of the clouds. I think that it really showed time and distance well with all the different kinds of clouds the character was seeing on the ship. I really liked that it touched on what it's like from an immigrant's standpoint showing the struggles and all of the work it took to acclimating to somewhere new and foreign. I was confused at some parts in the beginning but I think that was intentional because the character was also confused. Everything was in a different language than what he was used to and the foods were so different. I also liked