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Triptych

While looking around my room for inspiration, I gazed upon my chess board. After giving it a stare down, I knew how I wanted to use it for the triptych. I thought it would be interesting to play with the expectation of the names for each piece by swapping the title of knight for pony. In order to compose the triptych, I set up all of the black pieces to give the viewer a setting of a chess game. I then isolated the white pieces to highlight the individual characteristics of each piece. I used my desk lamp for extra lighting to further accentuate the pieces and draw attention to the background where the names were placed. To me, the most challenging part was combining the individual photos I took into one photo. However after finding a website that could do it, the rest of the editing was simple. The route I took for this project was different than most of the other assignments we’ve done because I used pictures instead of drawling. Overall I found this process to be relaxing and enjoyable.

Triptych .jpeg

Triptych

For as long as I can remember, haiku has been my favorite form of poetry. Although only 17 syllables long, these short three line poems can tell so much. In my triptych, I attempted to convey a comedic story, about a young boy asking a girl to be his partner for a project. Recently, I have been talking to my friends who are seniors in high school and are worried about finding their first college roommate. I have been teaching them the ins and outs of “glirting” or girl flirting which is important in making connections online to find a roommate. I started thinking about these conversations and how I could make a relatable comic about it but could not come up with a good way to execute it. My mind drifted towards the idea of flirting in general. Middle and high school aged boys can be pretty awkward, especially when it comes to talking to girls. My comic shows a high school aged boy, worrying about asking a girl “something.” In the first 2 panels, my hope is for the reader to assume that the boy is going to ask the girl out on a date or to a school dance. However, their is a plot twist in the last panel in which he actually asks her to be partners in a project, not to be a couple. I wanted the comedy to be seen through the dialogue, not so much the the images themselves. Instead of drawing pictures and scenes that would distract from the story, due to my lack of a strong artistic ability, I used the online resource, Storyboard That, to help me set the scene. The site allows users to pick characters, props, scenes and even allows you to choose from hundreds of colors and even emotions to personalize your comic. I feel like so far in this course, everything I have created artistically has been pretty abstract, or required less detail. However, when looking at the two examples we saw in class, I realized that these triptychs required much more detail to give the text more depth. Unlike our other projects, this was the first one that required me to come up with an original story, one that tells much more than a singular picture or some words on a page. It seamlessly combined them to give even more meaning than the two do separately.

 

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Cinema Smuggler

Filip scan

The inspiration for this comic is just based off of a random thought I had earlier this week. I wanted to make a humorous narrative so I made it about how it would be funny if the stereotypical “trench coat disguising two people”  went a step further. The hardest part of making this comic was the actual drawing of it. I’m not much of a drawer, so the last frame was particularly difficult to draw. Making this comic was completely different from any other writing assignment I’ve had this semester because it forced me to think about how I could represent the narrative visually.

Maus 2 Chapter 2 (2/22/18 In-class writing)

I found Chapter 2 of Maus 2 difficult to read due to various reasons. Art Spiegelman’s quote: “The comix I like, and try to do, can be read slowly and often…. I try to make every panel count and sometimes work as long as a month on a page…. I’m excited by the ‘secret language’ of comics — the underlying formal elements that create the illusions” makes it clear to me why I experienced difficulties while reading the chapter. Perhaps, one reason is that as he worked as long as a month on a page, he was improving and completing it, making even more detailed and complicated to read. I caught myself on a thought that sometimes I felt that I missed some events and I did not understand what was happening and needed to go back to read the page again. Probably I was reading it faster than he wanted his audience to read because he included too many events and key points, and all of them deserve to be noticed. Another factor was that the events and violence described by Spiegelman are psychologically hard to absorb and think about.

2/22/18 Quotes in Class

The Hillary Chute quote “Comics, in fact, is a medium that involves a substantial degree of reader participation to stitch together narrative meaning” really applies to this chapter of Maus. Reading this chapter gave us an insight of Artie’s life after his father died and how he continued writing the book. The stretch of time right after the passing of his father was rough for Artie, as he was being flooded with book deals and movie prospectors and the whole gamut of Hollywood big wigs trying to get the “Next Big Thing”. Artie seemed depressed and anxious during this time, as he was soon to be a father himself. However, his own father’s shadow lingered over him making him seem almost guilty or remorseful. Artie’s portrayal of himself in the novel also shrinks, his mouse representation gets physically smaller and he mentions he does not want to be a grown up anymore. All of these factors really require a lot from the reader to correctly interpret what is going on. We are required to piece together all of Artie’s thoughts and feelings to really get the whole picture of what is happening to him emotionally. When Artie goes to see Pavel, we learn that the reason Artie feels guilty is because he doesn’t want to be more successful than his father. He believes that living through Auschwitz was the epitome of “success” and doesn’t want to overshadow his father’s accomplishments. In a dark and twisty world this mindset makes sense.

Free Response

“The comix I like, and try to do, can be read slowly and often…. I try to make every panel count and sometimes work as long as a month on a page…. I’m excited by the ‘secret language’ of comics — the underlying formal elements that create the illusions” (24)

I think sometimes the details in the panels can be overlooked.  Readers may miss the hidden meaning because of how minute the elements of the comic are.  The masks are an obvious ‘secret language,’ however it’s details like the string that holds them to their face that you have to seek out.  I wonder why the string on the masks appears in part II of Maus.  Maybe it signifies an act or how people don’t always identify as what they are, they can take off their mask easily as opposed to it being something that’s apart of them.  There are many ways to interpret this.  One thing that I thought of was how, today, people in America who are 2nd or 3rd generation don’t cling to their nationality or religion as heavily.  At least for Jews, there was a study done in I believe 2013 where it showed that 1 in 5 Jews describe themselves as having no religion.

Today’s Quotes: In Class Free-Write

Richard McGuire’s Here is a very complex comic to follow compared to “Maus”. Given that comics, as said in “Why Comics”, “involves a substantial degree of reader participation to stitch together narrative meaning”, the complexity of the panels is positively related to the degree of focus and dedication one must have to the text. In the case of “Maus”, time changes tend to be relatively frequent, but are introduced in a relatively simplistic fashion, not changing time-frame more than two times in one go; however, “Here” presents multiple time frames in the span of just a few panels, and at times, two completely different and unrelated timeframes in a singular panel. “Here”‘s overabundance of timeframes also, in my personal opinion disrupts the comic’s “‘all-at-onceness,’ or its ‘symphonic effect'”, because I am not able to derive much sense of the comic by analyzing its general picture before starting to read. However, in “Maus”, glancing over the page before reading it and admiring its ‘all-at-onceness’ gives you a general sense of what’s to come, preparing your mind to read the text.

Quotes for class Today

While reading Maus, it flows like a story.  A reader would never expect how much alterations and tedious work went into the pattern of the panels of this graphic novel.  While it seems as though it could have been written paragraph by paragraph in a flowing manner, Art Speigelman admits to have put everything into ever detail of the pattern.  Since there is such a difference between how this was written and how it is read, this must be why it takes “reader participation” to read this text.  Readers are the ones who have the text flow as a story.  It is so interesting how perfectly Art places the transitions between Vladeks story and the modern panels that Art is actually present in.

Why Comics? (In-Class Writing)

Art Spiegelman talks about the “secret language of comics” and how they create illusions with formal elements. This can be seen in the very first chapters of his second volume of Maus. The first volume is a straightforward narrative. The only surreal element that is tied in is the comic that Art wrote when he was younger. However, in the beginning of this second volume he starts the very first chapter with a visual metaphor for his depression. He shows himself and other characters wearing masks of the animals that he has been drawing. And he shows himself regressing into childhood as he is asked to take on more responsibility and spearhead efforts to commercialize his father’s story.

This sequence, especially the masks, is very powerful and very hard to imagine in a medium without some visual component. Spiegelman does not explain the masks, and we are left to wonder what they could mean within the visual vocabulary of the book. It would be harder to describe this sequence in words without giving away his intention altogether, and as Spiegelman says, he likes comics that can be read “slowly and often”. This sequence especially almost requires a re-read, and so through the medium of comics, he has achieved this aim.

Why Comics?

Art Spiegelman: “The comix I like, and try to do, can be read slowly and often…. I try to make every panel count and sometimes work as long as a month on a page…. I’m excited by the ‘secret language’ of comics — the underlying formal elements that create the illusions” (24)

I think that this quote is similar to what comic stands for. In my experience, comics are read fast. You want to go to next page soon as possible since you want to see more action. But comics aren’t made for you to see a bunch of actions. These are made by people who want to convey their narrative visually. Sure if the panel has a lot of detail, it might be flashy, but they could also try to show the details of the story. Like in Maus where panels with most features are the ones that are interesting that one must read slowly to digest the content.

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