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.