The Secret Language of Comics

Month: February 2023

Week Ahead: 7

David's Posts
2/26 Sketch 7: Quadriptych
7 2/27 It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth
3/1 It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth Tracing Pages

There are no page numbers or even really clear chapter breaks in It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth so it’s a challenge to tell you where to break the reading. However, right about in the middle of the text there is a two page spread where on the left the cover of the book is reproduced and on the right there is another full page image that reproduces (with some differences) the dedication page from the front of the book.

This book is brand new — it just came out in November 2022. I’m going to be reading it right along with you, so I don’t know exactly how the narrative goes, though I have flipped through the book. I should warn you in advance that the graphic narrative includes pretty extensive and explicit discussions of self-harm and depression.

Zoe Thorogood is twenty-five years old. This is her second book, so I would imagine that the first set of comparisons we might make as we begin discussion on Monday will pick right up from the end of our discussion on Wednesday this week — what we look for from an author who is still young and close to the subject material versus from an older author writing from a greater distance, albeit with wider perspective. I think Thorogood is more “out there” than Walden is in Spinning but I’ll be curious to hear how you relate to her narrative. Also what you think of the tone and visual style of this new narrative.

Week Ahead: 5

David's Posts
2/12 Sketch 5: Triptych
5 2/13 Spinning– Prologue and chapters 1-3 (1-114)
2/15 Spinning — chapters 4-5 (115-82) Literacy narrative comic storyboard (in class)

I’m looking forward to seeing your Triptychs over the weekend — main thing I’m looking for is a comic with a beginning, middle, and end and/or with a clear pattern setup and then a twist.

On Tuesday, we’ll focus on the beginning of Spinning, starting off that discussion by comparing Walden’s graphic narrative to David Small and to Allie Brosh. Tillie Walden won the very prestigious Eisner Award for Spinning when it was published in 2018, when she was 22 years old. Spinning, which again was published when she was 22 years old, was Walden’s fourth graphic narrative book. In the five years since Spinning was published she has published eight more books (to be totally fair, two of those are forthcoming later this year). You can read all of her fifth book, On a Sunbeam online here — it’s worth at least glancing through some of those pages to get a sense of where her style has gone since Spinning.

We’ll start with comparing how Walden establishes character and setting compared to Small and how her tone /visual style is similar and different to Small’s. How does Walden use the page, panels, and gutters in comparison to Small? Note that there is one small moment in Spinning where Walden shows herself holding a copy of Stitches, so she has signaled for us that Small’s text is an influence for her — how has it influenced her as a writer?

Before class on Wednesday, please publish to your site images of your storyboard. They can be photographs of drawings if your work is analog. Just make sure they are legible. If you have a hardcopy of your work, bring that in with you to class too. We’ll spend a chunk of class in small groups sharing your storyboards and giving each other feedback. We’ll hopefully spend a bit of time discussing chapters 4-5 of Spinning too.

Conference Sign Ups

David's Posts

You can use this link to sign up for a conference. Please make a note in your calendar when you sign up.

I’m not embedding the form here because the Zoom link for conferences is included at the top of the sheet and I want to avoid publishing that link publicly for security purposes. The Zoom link is also in our Slack channel.

I’ve listed basically every free half-hour in my schedule from tomorrow through Tuesday. If none of the times listed works for you, then send me a message on Slack or email or talk to me after class today and we can schedule something individually, but I’m really hoping that everyone can find something that works from the list provided.

ChatGPT from OpenAI

David's Posts

The first really tangible example of the burgeoning research into Artificial Intelligence that broke into mainstream culture is the ChatGPT application produces by OpenAI. It’s a large-scale neural net with a natural language “chat” interface. It blew up at the tail end of last year and then has been the subject of lots of discussion at the start of this semester around how to understand its impact in educational institutions.

Some articles for more information:

Let’s spend some time in class discussing this tool and its implications. In preparation for that conversation, I tried starting a conversation with ChatGPT using two of the assignment prompts from this semester’s work that you’ll be responding to.

Here’s the discussion I had with it about David Small’s Stitches:

Open AI’s ChatGPT conversation about David Small’s Stitches and trauma
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