Stitches Part 1

     

     I didn't give more than one response option :/ Sorry guys, I guess I'm like David Small's mom in that way.

I'd take Ms. Trenchbull over Mrs. Small any day.

    

      Anywho, we’ve read a lot of graphic memoirs during the semester. Stitches is also a memoir, and focuses on childhood. It's a really dark look back at childhood too. Not like Matilda or A Series of Unfortunate Events with sprinkles of humor but dark like.. Well, I felt like I needed a hug after this one. I think there’s something to be said about graphic memoirs and their ability to affect the reader. Small, in Stitches, was able to visually convey a story of silence and internalized emotions with few words. This memoir is characterized more by what was absent than what was included. In a later interview Small talks about things he wishes he would’ve included:

     “One of them would have been the fact that I actually did have friends when I was a teenager. And I realized this was another instance where if I was going to talk about that the book was going to grow to 500, 600 pages. I did feel that I had to say something about it. And I felt I cleverly summed it up in that one page picture of a party scene. But if I were a reader I guess that would certainly leave all kinds of questions in my mind. Like, ‘What kind of friends did I have?’

     The interview is here if you're interested. 

     What do you all think? Do you feel satisfied with bits of David Small’s childhood that we’re getting? Why do you think he chose these vignettes instead of others? Were there questions that you had about his experiences that have yet to be answered (or what do you hope to see resolved)? Also, how do you think the absence of  information adds, or takes away from the story? 

Stitches, Part 1

Stitches (Part 1): Topics for Discussion

[Respond to your favorite(s)]

1) The thing that struck me most about Stitches on a first read through was how esoteric the characters were. Small doesn’t appear to spend a lot of time providing a lot of details about the interior lives of the characters, with the possible exception of the protagonist (himself as a child). After thinking about it and reading it again, I’m now of the opinion that the characters in Stitches do get a lot of treatment, but that treatment is very subtle. Small is using the details of facial expressions and gestures to tell us a lot about the different characters in the story, especially his parents.

This sort of approach is a very interesting one for a comic and presents some questions about the medium itself. In prose, the interior life of characters can be included seamlessly into the narrative because the author can express thoughts and feelings of the characters that don’t necessarily have a visual manifestation. In a comic however, there always has to some kind of visual image on the page, which means that these strategies can’t be directly translated from prose writing. While comics are far more participatory than, for example, film, they are also far less participatory than prose.

How does David Small convey the interior life of the characters in Stitches by using the tools available to him in the medium of comics? Is comics limiting in terms of being able to convey complex interior thoughts and feelings? How does Stitches expose or transcend these potential limitations?

2) Stitches is the first comic we’ve read this semester that employs the convention of onomatopoetic words in order to create auditory illusions for the reader. This convention has a lot of stigma attached to it, especially in superhero comics (BAM! POW!!!!) That stigma makes it unsurprising that it did not show up in the other comics works we read which definitely try to be ‘taken more seriously’. However, Small chooses to employ it here in a very serious, very realistic story.

 

What is the role of sound in Stitches? How does Small’s extensive use of ‘silent’ panels function within his narrative? Are these onomatopoeias a crutch, or are they a natural extension of the medium of comics?

  

3) Because of both the biographical facts of Small's life as well as the themes he is trying to construct, Stitches features several scenes that depict verbal, emotional, and physical abuse. The scene between David and his grandmother stands out in particular among the first half of the book as a very pointed example. On my first read-through this scene was definitely surprising and disturbing, especially because of the fluid narrative style Small employs. There’s a moment that happens a few panels into the act where you realize: ‘Oh. This is actually happening.’

 

What techniques of comics storytelling is Small utilizing to depict potentially disturbing scenes of abuse in a way that is affecting without being melodramatic? How did the medium of comics affect your reading of these scenes as opposed to similar scenes in, say, film or prose?

Kailynn's Discussion Post on 100 Demons

One Hundred Demons is a coming of age story. It shows the different “demons” Barry had to face while she was growing up. The name of this graphic novel makes it seem as if the story would be more intense or “scary” but as I read, I found that Barry’s demons were quite relatable. The one demon I was able to relate with is Barry’s mom! I laughed hysterically when she wrote “My mother, who was obsessively enraged with at least one person at all times, would not admit to hatred”.  This is my mom made over, specifically where she says that her mother was enraged with at least one person at all times—beyond relatable! Is there one chapter or “demon” that you were able to relate to? Is there one chapter that made you laugh hysterically like me?

What do you think of the demons she uses or discusses when she is older such as her first job? Do you see a change in the panels, drawings, or text boxes?

Overall, what did you think of the novel? Since this graphic novel is structured in vignette form, was it easy or hard to follow? What did you think of the different chapters going out of age order instead of chronological order? Do you think her story was more effective by putting these vignettes out of order? Or, would they have been more effective in relaying the story if they were in chronological order?

One Hundred Demons

Wow. What a different comic book. I've absolutely loved reading this so far. Dave Eggers wrote on the back that this book is approaching "oeuvre", which is basically a fancy word for a work of art. I found it peculiar that he had to say that, because I would think most comic books should fall under the form. But at the same time, reading the comic I understand what he means. This feels much more like a piece of an artistic expression than just a simple comic book. What are you thoughts on that? Is this a work of art, alike to something you'd see in a Museum, or is this simply another graphic novel? Why or why not?

I love the playful style Lynda uses in this novel (it feels more appropriate to call her Lynda instead of Barry... I don't know why, just roll with it). It's all very crude as Chelsea said in her post. I for one really like it. A lot of it feels all over the place, especially when we see the different title pages and all the different backgrounds. What do you think is the significance of all the different title pages? How does she use the different images, words, and scribbles on each of those pages to represent these demons?

Speaking of the art, each of the pages is pretty sparse (intro aside (man those pages were crazy)). But each "demon" has a distinct color. Why do you think that is? How do the colors speak to what's going on in the chapter, or to the demons? I'm positive these colors didn't come about by chance. Why does she use them?

Lastly, her storytelling style is very intriguing. She almost has two different stories going along. We have the story told in the boxes, and the story told through the images. Obviously these two intertwine to tell one great big story, but she also sometimes seems to have different things going on in both. Do you think one trumps the other? How do they work together?

One Hundred Demons

     Like Fun Home, One Hundred Demons also tackles a wide variety of topics brought up in childhood memories. While Bechdel utilitized her journal, Barry uses the exercise of painting a hundred demons to guide us through her memories. She gives us vignettes of her childhood and adulthood (side note: I read while researching that it's rumored Ira Glass was the ex-boyfriend in "Head Lice/ My Worst Boyfriend"!).
     The shift from Fun Home into One Hundred Demons was also a little jarring because of the art iteself. Bechdel illustrated very realistic drawings using a cold color palette. Barry, by contrast, illustrates really crudely. Her figures are drawn in ways that are unrealistic (limbs in "Dancing" are contorted in strange ways), and the colors used are bright watercolors or markers.

The style of this comic uses up a lot of space for the narration blocks, while leaving tons of blank space above and below the panels:

The resulting look is chaotic and feels almost claustrophobic. Why do you think Barry chose this style? What does it convey about the themes she brings up in the text? Do you find the style effective?

Fun Home (second half)

The entire novel explores the strange relationship between Alison and her father. The second half explores this relationship somewhat differently than the first. The use of literary reference begins from page one with the first mention of Icarus. How does the author’s use of literary reference inform your understanding of the story? Did you like how it ended with Icarus once more?

Furthermore, the second half contains the longer portion of the narrative about Alison’s English classes and their discussions of his favorite books. How does this interaction between “intellectual companions” affect your understanding of their relationship? Think back to the moment when Joan comes to visit and comments on how close she and her father are. Why does the author spend so much time showing how close they could have been?

Emotional distance is a key theme in this narrative. Repression and isolation form the ties of their family relationships. Yet, the use of handwritten texts throughout the story tell us that they were still in contact through this more removed from of communication. The diaries, as well, the passages of highlighted text act as clues to the deeper relationships between family members. How do these “illustrated” texts (that is they are shown in the novel as handwritten letters or highlighted portions of printed text) inform your grasp on the complex family relationships in the novel?

A comics medium is very intimate and personal in this illustration style. Why do you think the author, who so obviously was very read and interested in literature and included immense amounts of literary allusion, choose to illustrate this narrative? How do you think you would have understood the story if it were prose?

Fun Home (105-End)

One of the very first thing that stuck out to me about Fun Home is Bechdel's comic style. She uses a style pretty grounded in realism, never really expressing through marks or abstraction, along with her use of a monochromatic color scheme of a green grey ink wash. This is quite different from our last couple of books with color like King, or American Born Chinese. How does this use of color affect our view of Fun Home? Was a good decision to allow color in a story of coming of age?

Along with that, after watching the YouTube video of her talk about Fun Home, Bechdel mentions her diary entries from inside Fun Home as her first draft of the book. Did you make a similar connection between the book and the diary? Also within the diary how did she begin to experiment with the idea of image and text interacting? How did this effect our perception of her diary and thoughts?

Lastly over all what did you think of the book as a whole? What did you think of the non-linear format? Do you think she accomplished her goals of telling her coming of age story through the  death and memories of her father?

Reading and discussion by graphic artist Alison Bechdel

I found this video and found that it was truly interesting to watch. It is kinda of long, but I hope that by sharing this you find some ideas to think about that maybe we haven't talked about yet in the blogs. (The first ten minutes of the video is an intro by professors.)

Final Paper Instructions

Your final papers, due December 11th via email, should be somewhat more complex and research-heavy than your midterm papers. I also ask that the papers be 10-12 pages.

For this paper, I do not ask you to respond to a prompt, but instead to choose and explore a topic of particular interest to you. That means that you can look at a text or issue addressed in class that you DIDN'T explore in your midterm or transcend the boundaries of the class to focus on comics or issues in comics about which you are passionate.  I am more than happy to respond to ideas for papers and/ or provide you with a series of possible prompts if you like. However, you do have freedom to pursue what you choose.

As for finding research, I'd like you to include approximately three sources to enrich your argument (these might include peer-reviewed articles, books on comics lit or theory, or interviews with authors). I am also happy to help you find appropriate research for your chosen topic. By now, you should all have received your midterms with comments. I am happy to discuss them with you and help you figure out how to integrate my comments into final papers. Overall, I was TRULY impressed by the caliber of your work!

Questions on Fun Home (1-105)

Fun Home is a tragic comic that explores the coming of age story of the author Alison Bechdel and her struggle to come to grips with her sexuality. The novel starts with what must be her first memory of her father. The graphic novel covers many issues within queer theory, self discovery , and self identity. There are a few scenes and elements of the story that stuck out to me that I thought would be good discussion points for this blog.                

                                                                                 

The scene above from page 15 depicts a glimpse at Alison and her father's struggle to conform to the gender roles assigned to their sex. There are many of examples of this throughout the book. Is Alison trying to make a case that all homosexuals prefer roles of the opposite sex? For instance, does a gay man have to have feminine traits, and does a women have to have masculine traits in order to be gay?

The scene above is on page 58. Alison's mother uses the fact that the father was molested when he was young to explain his homosexual tendencies. Is this a valid argument? Why or why not?

Alison includes many boxes to describe things in the environment. Do you find this helpful in your reading? Or is it a distraction? Discuss.

Alison Bechdel and Fun Home

 Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was named one of Time magazine's 10 best books of the year in 2006. Prior to the publication of her graphic novel-cum-memoir, Bechdel was best known for her comic strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For," which was syndicated in a number of alternative publications throughout the country. In Fun Home, Bechdel persists in exploring some of the themes she first examined in her strips, particularly gender and sexual orientation, as well as the trials and tribulations of a smart and witty young woman in America. However, Bechdel's memoir is an even more personal and poignant account--both of growing up gay and simply growing up. Bechdel's book asks us to look at the future of contemporary American literature. Will the "great American novel" be something other than a traditional novel? Have we moved past the genre of the novel onto more hybrid literary forms, such as the graphic memoirs of Spiegelman and Bechdel?

See below for resources on Bechdel:

Comics Journal interview

All About Women Festival interview

Book with great chapter about Bechdel

Announcement of MacArthus Genuis grant award

Dykes to Watch Out For strip

Musical version of Fun Home

Cvetkovich article on the queer archive in Fun Home

Fun Home (1-105)

Fun Home, Topics For Discussion

1) The Relationship Between Text and Image
 

One of the first things that struck me about Fun Home was how dominant the text was in comparison to the illustration. There’s not really more of it (word-count-wise) than there was in the other stuff we’ve read, but Bechdel’s strong narrative voice really upstages her drawings a lot of the time (not a bad thing).

The relationship between the text (especially the narration) and the images becomes a really important part of Bechdel’s narrative strategy. One aspect of this that I think is particularly interesting is described by the concept of anchorage and relay, coined by Roland Barthes in his 1964 essay, ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’. (A pretty good summary can be found here http://tracesofthereal.com/2009/12/21/the-rhetoric-of-the-image-roland-barthes-1977/).

Barthes was looking at pictorial advertisements and analyzing the visual arguments they were making (but I think it’s a pretty clean translation to comics as well). For images, he wrote about the difference between denotative and connotative meanings. For the text, he identified two major roles that it could play: anchorage, which solidified the expected meaning of the associated image; and relay, which added different meanings or challenged the original meaning of the associated image (or vice versa).

Bechdel is using both strategies here with her narration, and I’ve included an example of each below.



Anchorage (Text solidifies the meaning of the image)

Relay (Text challenges the original meaning of the image)

How do you think Bechdel is playing on the relationship between text and image in Fun Home? What does this relationship look like in a ‘traditional’ comic? What are the limits and opportunities of this relationship?

 

2) Allusion and Comics as Literature

The other thing that really stood out to me about Fun Home was the expert use of allusion and reference, mostly to works from the Western literary canon. While obviously Bechdel weaves these references into excellent metaphors and poetic language, it did strike me as a bit strange. She is working the comics medium, so why reference so heavily to a totally different medium? Is she trying to ‘legitimize’ her comics work by making these references? Why not reference previous comics and/or graphic memoirs? Is there even a comics canon worth referencing?

More Than Meets the Eye

Now that we have read through the entire graphic novel, we can see how Yang has interwoven and tied all three story arcs together.

Wei-Chan's transformer is incredibly symbolic in the graphic novel. In this vain, we see many of the characters making physical transformations (Danny to Jin, Chin-Kee to the Monkey King, etc.). What are some other ways the characters transform? Are these transformations - or changes - for he sole purpose of adapting to American society?

Now that we have read "American Born Chinese" in its entirety I am curious to see if our own perceptions of the novel have changed. Clearly, there is more to the story than initially meets the eye. Why do you think Yang chose to tell Chin-Kee's story in the form of a television sitcom, while on the hand, told the Monkey King's arc as a mythic tale? How do those two threads compare, contrast, or even compliment Jin's story?  

Extra Credit Project

 Due on December 1st, after Thanksgiving break (giving you the CHANCE to avoid your family during Thanksgiving break by saying you are working on a school project!), your extra credit optional assignment asks you to draw your own comic of approximately one to two pages, inspired by the work we've read this semester.  You might write something autobiographical, like Spiegelman's Maus or Bechdel's Fun Home, or entirely made-up, like Gene Yang's American Born Chinese.  You can use black and white or color images.  I only ask that you submit one copy to my mailbox at McMicken and upload one copy to the blog (we can make sure those entries are private), so we can discuss your work with the class.  I also ask that you include a 1 page write-up, explaining your work/ experience making the comic.

 I know some of you are better artists than others.  The assignment is more about seeing the ways in which the work you've read have influenced your use of panels, space, and narrative structure, rather than your artistry.  If you can only do stick figures, do stick figures.  If you want to use digital tools to make your images, that is okay, too (see example). The author of Hyperbole and a Half uses Paintbrush.

There's a lot of information online about creating comics.

Look at:

rules for drawing comics

making a comic

this youtube video on making a comics page.

how to draw comics 

this WikiHow on making comics

how to make a comic book

online comics tool

General Comics Links and News

Great article about "why comics are more important than ever" in the digital age

Local comic on the Cincinnati riots, Mark Twain Was Right, published

Get involved in the Graphic Futures project. Proposals due, soon!

Check out Jill Lepore's new look at the "secret" history of feminist icon, Wonder Woman

Present a paper (maybe one you wrote for class!) for the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics conference

Racism in "American Born Chinese"

This narrative is unlike the others we have read so far in that it is comprised of three very distinct narratives that seem to have no overlap.  We see an adaptation of the Chinese myth of the Monkey King, a contender for the most racist sitcom ever created, and a simple story of a Chinese boy at a new school.  But I don't think the author would just write three completely separate stories and not create some kind of connective thread between them.  What do you think connects these stories?  Is it that they all center on outsiders fighting an in-crowd?  Or are these characters fighting something else?

One thing all three of these stories have in common is overt racism, which is at times downright offensive.  The Monkey King feels like a victim of racism and so he strikes back at the other deities that saw him as inferior.  The sitcom starring Chin-Kee (even typing that name feels wrong, I must admit) shows the title character as a walking amalgamation of every racist stereotype and caricature of Asian people every created.  Jin Wang's story has him being the victim of racism, but he seems to have racist views as well.  Given all the overtly displayed racism in this story, what do you think that the author is saying about racism?

Finally, the artwork in this story is very different from every other novel we have read.  The style is very cartoony and very colorful, which seems like an odd choice given the subject matter.  But I also think that Yang makes some very interesting choices with regards to the artwork, such as having Chin-Kee (Ugh!) have yellow skin or having the Monkey King break out of a comic panel into nothingness.  Do you think the art style works for this book?  Why or why not?