Graphic Novels

I have just recently started to read a couple different graphic novels. I tend to not read them for various reasons but have decided to give them a try. I have been surprised at how much I am enjoying them. A friend of mine started me reading them and I am glad that he did. Up until now I have only been reading for pure entertainment and stayed around things that I could relate to or that I was comfortable reading. I am about to change all of that though with the comics I will be starting in the near future.

The first comic I will be reading is Black Hole by Charles Burns. This book is set in the 1970's and centers on the life of some high school students. It tells a story about a plague that is passed among the students which leads to murders. The reason I am going to read this graphic novel is that it is a story which is a metaphor for high school life. I want to see how the author develops the story and what specific aspects he uses as metaphors. I like reading metaphors but I don't usually read stories about young adults or teens which will be a change for me. The story also has some gruesome and horrific art and ideas which I usually stay away from but I will try and keep my mind open as I read the book.

The second graphic novel I will be reading is Blood : A Tale by J. M. Dematteis. This story is really out of my comfort zone because it is about a vampire. After the Twilight debacle, I tend to give a very wide berth to anything that has to do with vampires. The story line seems intriguing though. It varies depending on which review you read between the idea that an ancient king is told stories of a vampire by a strange spirit to the dying dreams of a king about a vampire that exists but does not exist. I'm going to read it because I'm curious to see how a story can be told which such differing ideas about what really happened and yet be called one of the greatest graphic novels to come out of the 1980's. It is also said to have some of the best artwork in a comic and I'm interested to see how the artist portrays this wild and fanciful story in a visual capacity.

The third, but not last, graphic novel I intend to broaden my horizons with is Finder : Voice by Carla Speed McNeill. Again, this is a new direction for me as the story centers around a medieval combatant competing for knighthood. I usually don't read stories like this because my little sister does nothing but talk about medieval times and read books and watch movies and write stories all about an over romanticized, fanciful, ridiculous period of history with no regard for how brutal, uncomfortable, and disgusting the era actually was. However, I am going to try and set my prejudices aside and read the story with an open mind and try and learn something from it.

Sequential Art

Maus is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman. It depicts a families escape from the Nazi's and the different obstacles that entailed. It portrays the main characters of the family as mice, the police and medical staff as pigs, and the Nazi's as cats. The character depiction is an entire discussion in and of itself because of the ingenuity but I am only going to focus on one aspect of it. I am going to discuss something that was brought to my attention by Scott McCloud.

Scott McCloud is the author of Understanding Comics. He has made comics and graphic novels very accessible to the intellectual which is a revolutionary endeavor. From a semi early age, I always thought that comic books were for nerds and children. My journey through the Shepherd University communications department has definitely changed my opinion but not so much as Scott McCloud's book. It shows the intellectual and academic value of reading and understanding comic books as well as foster a growing appreciation of their entertainment value.

One of the aspects that McCloud discusses is Sequential Art. This refers to the ability of the artist to add body to a scene or to tell an entire story, simply by putting images together as shown in the image to the left. This can be done by putting hundreds of images together to explain very minute details, or by putting just two images together and giving a sense of the action. Maus is full of examples. It would be very difficult to portray every aspect of the story in Maus through images, but the artist is able to shorten the space drastically by strategically placing images in the story line. One of my favorite examples is when Lucia comes to visit Vladek and in the space of two frames goes from having a standing conversation to grovelling on the floor. The intriguing part is that the story is not slowed down or made more confusing at all. In fact it gives a sense of the urgency that she feels and makes us feel for her as a character. The artist's ingenuity is phenomenal.