Understanding Comics reflection

When reading the Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud the reader is able to learn while also observing the techniques right before their eyes simultaneously, which is a rare experience to say the least.  The author does a fantastic job of breathing life into what is a explanation of how and why comics work and how they are constructed along with different theoretical ideas thrown in without it ever really being boring. 

As an artist, I of course look at comics more artistically and I don’t worry about the writing as much, but as Scott McCloud points out, writing and art have to be combined seamlessly for a comic to be successful and have a push and pull system that keep them in check. I also thought it was interesting about how he talked about letter being some of the most abstract ideas/symbols we recognize, and that are also art and should be treated as such.

I also thought the writing about how each person in the comics industry move up in the world and how far they are willing to go was interesting. He never comes across as thinking that the artists that just want to work in the comic industry and don’t want to be big artists are lazy or bad, but he also talks about the masters as if they always have things to strive for so there really is no end to learning in the comic industry. I also really appreciated the fact that the comic wasn’t super wordy so it made the read much more enjoyable.

Rough Translation of A Week of Kindness by Mark Ernst

A Week of Kindness is a strange work that leaves a lot of context as to what is happening to the reader. When reading, I thought that it was about the different kindnesses the different people were giving to the chicken or chicken-men, only to receive death or a horrible fate in return that seems to be not the doing of the chickens or the chicken-men.

We are also shown the chicken-men and other monster-like men later in the comic experimenting and being cruel to human women. So possibly there is a twist and the chicken-men do know why the women are being murdered or are the cause of their death?  We are also shown another picture of a human women hanging one of the chicken-men, which might imply that the "kindness" so to speak is given back at times. 

Whatever the true definition, the work has a good sense of checks and balances.  In which whenever something happens to one character, you will usually see them in the next panel either alive or not.

The Arrival

Reading The Arrival was a pleasantly interesting experience.  For one, the book doesn’t have any words, but that make the reader confused as to what’s going on at all – in fact, the author seemingly creates a much more powerful story without them.

The first page of the comic shows the context of the characters and how they are/what they are like before you even get to see them in the coming pages and in the last panel. These panels are all playing off of items/contexts that we know are of families and we know this because well – for the most part, we grew up with a family similar to this one.  We had our picture put up on the fridge as kids,  we lived with parents that had clothing or possessions close to the ones shown – or at the least have seen these as a common media trope in the west as to what a “normal family” should look like.

But then we are shown the father leaving on a boat and overcoming all different kinds of problems. And if you didn’t understand that the father was immigrating to another country, these panels show what immigration looks like to a lot of people in the west.  It shows actions/tropes that we associate with immigration such as health screenings, language and history tests, and the different documents that have to be recorded and taken during the whole process. And again, none of this is done with words but rather with imagery of the human experience. Ideas and imagery that we can relate to - even if we’ve never done it ourselves because we’ve heard stories or have read about it.   The Arrival is a personal story, but for the readers, they are able to project a story, even possibly their own story, on to this character because of the familiarity of his human experience with their own.

The Arrival also does a fantastic job of making the reader feel what the main character feels.  When the main character moves to this strange land, he’s obviously confused and overwhelmed by his own foreignness to the country.  The Arrival makes the reader feel this way as well no matter where they came from because the country is drawn in a surrealist type art style that makes the world look strange and fantastical to anyone.  This also means that for any type of interactions with the strange machines, foods, animals, or language of the country, the reader is just as clueless as the character – which I think is a very rare feeling in literature. Personally, one of my favorite panels (shown above on the right) shows the main character putting up posters as his new job, but because it was in a language he didn’t know, he glued them all upside down.  As a reader, at first  I wasn’t sure at first why the man was mad at him, and it took me a moment to realized what had happened, and this again is a unique feeling that is only achieved by the reader being just as confused as the character.