Bleh

I don't have nearly enough creative energy to come up with not one, but two unique titles for my posts every week.

Since I finished Blankets ahead of schedule and no new readings were assigned, I suppose I'll talk about the McCloud chapters that we read this week. I have to admit that I was disappointed when I found out that the subject of Chapter 3, "Blood in the Gutter", was not actually comic book violence. The brief depiction of the ax murderer slightly raised my hopes, but in vain. Oh well. The chapter was still fairly interesting, regardless. Creative use of the "gutter", or space in between panels, is an idea that had not occurred to me before reading this chapter. I'm used to reading the comics in the newspaper, where all of the different strips have so much allotted space and in large part just use three identically sized and equally spaced boxes to convey the action. However, in a larger magazine, or especially in a graphic novel such as Blankets, the artist has much more freedom with the layout of the pages and can do creative things with the panel size and shape.

I also found the bit about the different types of transitions to be interesting, if a little dry and scientific for the comic book medium. Some of the distinctions between the different transitions still seem a little arbitrary to me, but I think that McCloud does a good job of making something out of nothing with his research. The bar graphs make his points seem more credible because he can back up his claims with numbers and data. I wonder, though, if some of the claims made regarding the influence of Eastern art on Western art and vice versa are a bit outdated by now. It would be interesting to see now whether American graphic novels have taken more visual cues from Japanese manga, etc...

Chapter four does a good job of presenting and analyzing the challenges facing both the artist and the reader when attempting to convey time in comics. The passage of time in even the simple of scenes in comics is at best an estimation and at worst completely ambiguous. McCloud also makes a good point about the sequencing of panels. Sometimes I'm not sure which panel I'm supposed to look at next. There is no one perfect order that all artists and audiences are supposed to follow, as evidenced by the fact that most western comics tend to read left-to-right while their Japanese counterparts read right-to-left. Finally, I liked how McCloud broke down the various ways that artists have used to represent motion in comics over the years. Little motion blur lines are seldom thought of as distinctive elements of an artist's visual style, but McCloud proves that there is no simple way to show motion in a comic, giving rise to a variety of methods and styles that attempt to animate in an otherwise static medium.

In other news, I have added a list of links to the blogs of other members of the class, a blog roll, if you will. I cannot guarantee that every title is accurate or that every link works--these things have a habit of changing without notice and as I had to manually input the titles and links myself (is there a more automatic way?), they may be subject to human error. Nor can I guarantee that every person's blog is listed there. I counted, and I think I may have left a few out. If I neglected to list someone's blog it's either because I accidentally passed them over, or because I secretly hate them. Either way, really. I've also taken the liberty of sprucing the place up a bit, filling out juicy details in my profile and putting up a picture. Maybe someday soon I will work up the courage to venture forth and post comments on other people's blogs. Perhaps they will even reciprocate. For now I remain secure in the knowledge that the picture posted below is hilarious. If you fail to see the genius of these pictures, make sure that you actually click on them, as many of them will be animated. If they still fail to amuse you, then it's because you have no sense of humor.

So I finished Blankets...

...and I have to say that the final chapters were not exactly what I was expecting. I guess I'm used to novels and movies that feel compelled to end on a dramatic note--a wedding, a death, a battle. We all crave closure at the end of a story; we want to be able to read the final words of a book and know with certainty the fates of the relevant characters. Cliff-hangers are maddening. I wouldn't exactly accuse Blankets of such, but the ending does seem rather abrupt and not especially...well, conclusive. It makes enough sense, I suppose. I mean, this is supposed to be a portrayal of Craig's childhood and adolescence. In this sense, the story ending with him growing up and going off to college is to be expected.

However, Thompson is very selective with his presentation of the fates of the characters in the story. We learn that his brother gets married, for example, but we never hear a word about Raina or her family after Craig says his final goodbye to her. Given the first person narration, it makes sense that our knowledge of Raina ends when the protagonist is also cut off from her. But at the same time, one can't help but wonder what became of her. Thompson is careful to present to the reader a very dramatic and unstable family situation, but we never learn what happens with Raina's graduation, or her parent's divorce, or the tension between Ben and Raina's father. In this sense, the reader feels slighted by the hitherto reliable, if a bit sporadic, narration.

Similarly, I was surprised by the open-ended nature of Craig's fate. The last few chapters tell us how he grew closer to his brother, renounced Christianity, and broke up with Raina, but there's no clear ending note. I half-expected at least a few throwaway lines about how he graduated from college, found someone else, started working on graphic novels, etc...Instead, the story ends with him taking a walk in the snow which, while certainly in keeping with the meditative tone of the story, seems arbitrary. I don't need the words "THE END" stamped on the last page of every book I read, but I do like the sense of closure and reassurance that I get from a good, solid ending.

I'm supposed to have a roster of the blogs of the other members of the class, but after wrestling with things for a while, I've decided to attend to that at a later date. Maybe it would help if I didn't wait until 3 in the morning to write my posts. I'll get the hang of this blogging thing, yet. In the meantime, I leave you with a picture from my formidable humor folder. I believe you will find its grave and serious nature to be a welcome reprieve from the irreverent tone of my posts.

Blankets, Ch. 2-5

This is my second post and I'm still learning about this whole blogging thing, so these early posts are going to be pretty simple and more or less stick to the readings. Also, I feel I must apologize for the title of my blog. "John's Comical Blog" is at best a bad pun and at worst false advertising, as I fear that as of yet there is absolutely nothing of humorous value in my posts. So please forgive me for the title--it's still a work-in-progress.

After getting past my initial surprise at the presentation of Blankets, I was able to dive more into the plot and the characters in the next several chapters. What has struck me the most about the story thus far is the breadth of topics that it touches on. And, strangely, though my childhood experiences were very different from the protagonist's, I was amazed at the amount of the story that I felt I could relate to on a very personal level.

For one thing, I am also the older of two brothers. And Thompson's description of his interaction with his brother will almost certainly resonate with anyone who has a sibling, especially boys who have a younger brother. As an older brother, you feel at once both protective and dismissive of your younger brother. It is especially difficult to reconcile these conflicting feelings about your sibling when you yourself are still very young and immature. There were definitely times in my life when I found myself being cruel or disapproving to my brother without being able to justify my actions. Sometimes you just do things and afterwards wonder why it felt necessary to provoke someone that seems to look up to you. Every older sibling worries from time to time that he or she has done a poor job of protecting a younger sibling and the protagonist definitely seems to regret how he treated his brother as a child.

The setting of Blankets is the snow-strewn Midwest. I was born in Tennessee, but I've lived most of my life in Illinois, so I found myself relating to the narrator's experiences in Wisconsin and Michigan. Winter and snow are recurring themes throughout the story, and having lived in the Midwest really helps to imagine the setting. I have memories of playing in the snow with my brother and friends and going skiing. Hell, I still play out in the snow with my friends. I'm no huge fan of the cold, but if you live out here, you can't really get away from it, so you might as well make the best of it.

The other aspect of the story that I found myself identifying with was the idea of a long distance girlfriend. During my freshman year of high school, my family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma for my dad's job. We only spent a year there before moving back to Illinois, but at the end of the year, I asked a girl to the Freshman Spring Formal. We started talking over summer break during sophomore year, which eventually developed into a long distance relationship. My girlfriend came to visit me over winter break that year and it was just...weird. I mean, it was great to actually be able to spend time with the person that you've been talking to over the internet and the phone for the past year, but at the same time I think we both felt a lot of anxiety. I had to imagine what it must have been like for her, living in someone else's house, with someone else's family, without your own family there. And of course all of the tension and pressure that comes from having more or less unlimited access to each other. Even though you're careful to explain to the parents that there is a separate bedroom available for your guest, it's inevitable that both parties will end up spending their nights in the same room.

Like the protagonist, this was my first and only experience with having a girlfriend and it was hard trying to figure out how you're supposed to behave around each other when you haven't actually been around the other person the entire time. Suddenly spending an entire week living with someone that you haven't seen for over a year can be kind of awkward and I think Thompson really picks up on that in these chapters of Blankets. There is a constant tension between Craig and Raina where both of them seem unsure of their physical relationship. On one hand, they've been in correspondence for a long time and Raina's mother makes the comment that she could almost imagine the two of them being married. On the other hand, they've only physically been together for a matter of days and Craig seems reluctant to touch her. He seems uncomfortable around her, and yet at the same time he is incredibly satisfied just to watch her sleep. Thompson really captures the feelings of uncertainty and ecstasy that surround first love.

Inaugural Post

This will be the first post in this blog created for my English 300 class. I'm a bit behind with these initial posts, so I'll just get right to my thoughts on the readings.

Blankets is the first graphic novel that we're reading for this class and I have to admit that it's not what I expected. Of course, I really didn't know what to expect from this course. I was rather surprised when I walked into the class and was handed a pamphlet-like syllabus that told me I would need to read a comic book that explained...comic books. And I was even more surprised to learn that I would need to create a blog for the course. I've never had a blog before, so this whole experience has been somewhat unfamiliar to me.

But anyway, on to Blankets. I suppose what struck me first was the...rough, for lack of a better word, nature of the illustrations and text. I expected some sort of artsy, elegant illustrations with appropriately flowing text. I assumed that it would read something like the Dilbert or Calvin and Hobbes comics that I used to read: a predetermined number of more-or-less equally sized panels full of self-contained scenes. Instead, this book varies wildly in its presentational style. Virtually nothing is consistent between the pages.

For one, the size and shape of the panels is all over the place. Gone are the simple, square panels of the comics in newspapers. Some of the panels are large, some are small; some have strange and unusual shapes; some have unusual borders; some pages have a single panel with a caption underneath--some pages have no panels at all. There are times when the panels seem insufficient for the task of containing the action of the moment and the illustrations spill out over the edges of the box. The traditional "speech bubble" is also played with here. A character's words may begin in one panel and carry on for several more. At times there are illustrations within the speech or thought bubbles, and sometimes Thompson places small panels within larger ones.

The overall visual style of Blankets also surprised me. For such a serious work, it appears rather "cartoony" at first glance. However, as McCloud explains, the less realistic art style creates characters that require the reader to bring his or her own thoughts and experiences to them in order to fill them out. This helps the reader to identify with the characters on a more personal level. This art style also allows Thompson to incorporate more imagination into his work. There are occasional depictions of demons and other supernatural phenomena that a more realistic art style would probably struggle to represent. Blankets is as much about the author's feelings and innermost thoughts and imaginings as it is about the actual events of his life, so it's important that Thompson has access to some more abstract representations of reality.

Lastly, the appearance of the text surprised me. As I mentioned earlier, I'm used to reading comics with either very carefully penned handwriting, or more often, word processed type. The hand written style of the text here caught me off guard, but it matches the visual presentation of the art in the story very well. It also allows Thompson to do more creative things with the text. Beyond simply bolding, italicizing, underlining, or enlarging words to emphasize them, Thompson can change the entire style of the handwriting to match the scene. Narration and typical dialog may have a consistent, simple style of text, but more "active" panels feature text that seems more hastily and violently written. The words of an angry adult might be very large and jagged, whereas the words of a frightened child might be very small and wavy.

These are just the ideas that went through my head after having picked up the book for the first time. I'll address elements of plot and characterization in other posts.