Week Three: The Comic Strip

For this week, I read the collection of Little Nemo comics, Krazy Kat and The Rarebit Fiend. The specific story I thought was interesting the The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend comic strips. These newspaper comic strips began on September 10, 1904 and ran until 1925. They were released under the publisher, New York Herald and were immensely popular for their time. They were drawn and written by American Cartoonist, Winsor McCay.

All of these comics follow a different set of characters, all having the same dilemma. They all embark on a strange and often unfortunate dream, with extreme cases of luckiness or misfortune. They involve shrinking to unhuman sizes, taking medicine to grow taller for the women of your dreams, licking too many postage stamps and repeatedly sitting, laying, leaning and stepping in multiple slabs of sticky bug paper.  The idea is meant to be fantastical, as none of this could really happy, minus the sticky paper.

There meant to represent dreams and how far fetched they can be, and how they can leave a lasting impression on you after you wake up. The comics themselves follow a very common layout. Starting at the top left, and ending at the bottom right. They do not ever break this layout and part of that is obviously because of there limitations.

These comics were printed on the tiny corners of newspapers back when they could only print in black ink and with very think edges. meaning a lot of the clean crisp lines or comics would be lost. The art here is shaded with dots and etching, and line work is very minimalist and readable from far away, usually relying on silhouettes and readable caricatures. Comics like this would be the inspiration for many American comic artists of the early 1900's and the beginning of the comic book franchise.

Week Two: Understanding Comics

When talking about Understanding comics, an interesting topic brought up by Scott McCloud in his Visual Magic of Comics TED talk is the idea of viewing a monitor of a computer as not a page but as a window. He discusses that we can take advantage of the digital medium for comics by creating an infinite canvas along any axis that we'd like, and that creating our comics with this infinite space in mind can lend to the viewers experience. His examples include having circular narratives that are actually circular, having a infinite comics on the X axis, or Y axis, having turns and bends in our panels and breaking narratives that literally break into two separate story lines.

This method was used by other artists and is used by many online E-comic pages today, one example is Lezhin Comics, a webtoon portal based in Korea offering artwork and comics in English, Korea and Japanese. This website takes advantage of one of Scott's ideas, that of an infinite scrolling Y axis. This way the comics, instead of going from left to right and constantly changing pages, goes from top to bottom and always continues scrolling down from the beginning of the comics to the end. Many comics that I have enjoyed on this site take this feature of the site to their advantage, having cuts and long fades from black to white and using minimalist style to help emphasize a scene to the audience.

Scott McCloud states that the idea that he's looking for is a Durable Mutation. Something that can change how we view comics and enhance it without losing what makes them so unique. Comic books and the genre as a whole are an expansive genre and not all of it fits into the same narrative arch and panel structure. Some artists will stick true to a basic panel layout while others will do everything in their power to deviate and try to change how
the viewer takes in their work by changing the panels and the structure.
This is no different and I believe it is the next big step to
changing comics for the digital post print generations.

Week One: Understanding Comics

The Arrival is supposed to be read almost like we are seeing a storyboard of a movie or animated film. It doesn't have any words or anything written but we can still know whats going on within the visuals. It seems very dreamlike with mystical creatures, instruments, and places. It seems to take place with a realistic style but yet it seems to be very high fantasy. We get very interesting visuals and every action is told with at least a panel or two. The main character seems to be in a world that he doesn't really understand and I feel as the viewer I feel similar to the main character. We are kind of in this strange world with text and imagery that I don't think anyone can really understand. The new places the main character are visiting he seems lost and not sure where he is going. I think it's really successful in being able to tell the story simply and with a perspective that is unique.