The Secret Language of Comics

Tag: week ahead

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.

Week Ahead 3: Brosh, Small, Sousanis, and Olson

David's Posts
1/22
3 1/23
1/25

You should finish up your Literacy Narratives this weekend. Post the essay to your site as a page (not as a post) then you should also write a post that provides a compelling overview of your essay and also reflects on the writing process. In that post, link to the essay’s page.

On Tuesday, we’ll spend a bit of time discussing Adventures in Depression, Part Two, but we’ll likely devote most of the class period to discussing Randy Olson’s ABT thesis structure. You should be able to skim the Olson essay fairly quickly — the key idea is understanding the (bad) deductive structure that Olson describes and then his suggestion for improving it by utilizing a (good) inductive structure instead.

In class on Thursday, we’ll spend the bulk of our time discussing the opening section of Stitches. As you read those first 50ish pages I would like you to consider the following questions:

  • How does Small establish character and setting in the introduction?
  • This chapter all takes place while David is 6 years old. What are the major subdivisions of the chapter though? You’ll probably decide that there are three (maybe four) major sections in these pages — what is the primary idea being conveyed by each section?
  • Pick the single page that you find the most compelling or interesting or that you think is the most important in today’s reading. Describe the page in a few sentences. Why is it interesting or important?

We’ll also look at two chapters from Unflattening by Nick Sousanis, who drew Unflattening as his dissertation for Teachers College at Columbia University — it was the first comics dissertation ever and has since been published by Harvard UP and has won a bunch of awards. Sousanis took a job at San Francisco State University a couple of years ago and is building a comics studies program there.

Unflattening will serve as one of the theoretical frameworks for our analyses of comics. Be aware that this comic is probably a little more dense reading than you’ll find Stitches to be, so give yourself a little extra time to work through those 20 pages carefully. I’ll start off our discussion of Sousanis by asking you to consider how effective Unflattening is as an academic, philosophical argument. (Soon we’ll read another theoretical framing text, but in the form of a more traditional essay by Hillary Chute and I’ll ask you to consider how the two pieces are similar and different.) How do the words and images in Unflattening interact together? Is it different than what happens in Stitches?

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