The Comic Book : Marvel and Hergé

This week was a focus on the comic book in the context of two comics: Marvel's Mary Marvel and Hergé's TinTin.

Mary Marvel and TinTin already have basic differences built into them. TinTin is about a young boy and the adventures he experiences around the world with his colorful, if imperfect, captain friend. Mary Marvel deals with an idealized teenage girl and how she battles crime in her neighborhood.

With these two comics are already being so different, I tried to look out for more interesting stylistic contrasts.

What ended up surprising me most about these comics were the extreme differences in formatting.

In Mary Marvel, Mary leaps over panel borders to grab criminals, speech bubbles change shape from a circle to a squiggle to a storm cloud to suit the mood. Meanwhile, big blocks of color guide our eye and unify each page by breaking up the narrative into specific color fields. In other words, Mary Marvel has the traditional flair most commonly associated with comics.

Surprisingly, TinTin is almost opposite in formatting. Almost every panel is a square, for example, and the speech bubbles are almost always static boxes as well. Many of these text boxes are even allowed to hog more than half of some panels.

The text in TinTin is different than what mainstream comic readers are used to as well. The font is surprisingly condensed and in sharp italic, as opposed to the bubbliness of Miss Marvel. I find this is quite a problem when TinTin also lacks the big blocks of solid color that Mary Marvel uses. Although there is some color scripting, Hergé still includes so many individual elements that the eye does not have many places to rest, and the page does not have a clear sense of hierarchy.

And so, I have discovered preferences for comic formatting I didn't know I had. Great things have been said about TinTin, but I will likely not pursue it further after discovering how much I was jarred by the formatting.

Comments

European Comics: Blacksad

Today I read the first book of Blacksad , an edgy French comic written by Juan Diaz Canales and illustrated by Juanjo Guarnido. The comics follow a panther detective through a series of anthropomorphic noir mysteries. I really enjoyed Blacksad . The story is a fairly standard mystery, but Blacksad's voice is engaging and authentic as a noir narrator, and the artwork is amazing. I felt that the art style was especially effective because it helps immediately establish character personalities--the criminals are rats and scaly creatures, the sheriff is a border collie, etc. I also tend to find that in noir movies or comics all the characters tend to look the same (all the men are square-jawed and serious, the women attractive and curvy) and the style of Blacksad helped prevent this from happening for me. Guarnido also does a fantastic job at using different shot angles and engaging acting within the panels. I enjoy this kind of visual storytelling much more than flatt

Contemporary Lit: Asterios Polyp

This week I re-read Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. I read the Asterios Polyp for the first time almost by accident--I was waiting for someone in a library and grabbed it to pass the time, and was very surprised at what a great work it is. I enjoyed re-reading it with a more analytical mindset. One thing I found unique about Asterios Polyp is how well Mazzucchelli visually shows the psyche of characters. When characters fight, they begin to become more visually different and more in their own worlds of thinking the less they are in tune with each other. Without the narrator expressly telling us, we understand how the characters are feeling in relation to one another. This way, the writing and art can work together to keep us very engaged because we are not being told the same thing twice--we're learning something new from both the writing and the art. Showing the raw lines of the characters helped nail down the existentialist nature of the comic as well--people are visual

The Arrival : Shaun Tan

Welcome to my blog! For my first post I read The Arrival by Shaun Tan. A silent graphic novel, The Arrival puts a surrealist spin on the immigration experience, inspired by Tan’s own experience immigrating to Australia. Tan’s mastery of illustration and research of real immigration stories come together beautifully in this compelling novel. Though The Arrival is marketed as a children's book, it takes a mature and eye-opening approach to its subject. The protagonist, an immigrant leaving his family to start a new life in an unfamiliar country, must navigate an unfamiliar place without knowing its language. The Arrival puts its reader in the same position--we must navigate the book without words. Instead of language, Tan uses character acting, panel setup, and the details he chooses to focus on to tell the story. For example, at the beginning of the novel Tan shows a montage of different objects around the immigrant’s home--a child's drawing of the family,

Lauren's Literature of the Graphic Narrative

Search This Blog