The Comic Books: Carl Barks & Tintin

After looking at Carl Barks’s paintings of Donald Duck and some research about it, I found something interesting. Donald Duck has traits of a stingy and rigid personality. It seemed like an unpopular personality, but people like its character. I think it is the most successful part of the character recreation— it turned a character with a lot of negative traits into a popular character, through humanization and humor. Donald Scrooge’s character has an outstanding trait that he loves money to an extreme degree. He never forgives any opportunities to find golds. He doesn’t find money only to live a wealthy life, the money he owns surpassed that—it becomes his aspiration to find money, like chasing his dream. He could go sailing or mining for finding golds and doesn’t care whatever he does. As long as he can swim in the sea of gold and money, it makes him feel good; money is his spiritual support. I think it is truly an interesting character how persistent he was. Just like what the social commentaries said: “the character shines through his persistence despite the obstacles.”

Tin Tin on the other hand, usually tells stories about the unexpected things happened in another country. Tin Tin is different from Donald Duck’s stories which he brings people on adventures and opens a whole new word for the readers. But Donald Duck is more about how unusually but funny the characters are, how Donald Duck reacts to the situations, and the interactions between his nephews and him also become the highlights. 

From my observation about the comic books and comic strips, I think comics strip focus on small pieces of stories while the comic books focus on a certain topic or genre as a whole and the type of content is consistent throughout. 

Peanuts and Flash Gordon Dailies (1959)

My favorite of all the comics for this week is Peanuts. Unlike the others, Peanuts has a particular format in which it tells a story within four panels or a page. Although there are many pages, there never be repeated stories. The stories are precise and fun, which reminds me of how advertisements usually are--quick and to the point. Another interesting thing is that I could see how the character develops over a period (I read Peanuts Vol 1 1950-52), and throughout the time, Charlie and Lucy went from action-directed stories--some short stories didn't even have words, to conversation based stories. There are more contents and shows more of their personalities. 

Another story I read was the Flash Gordon Dailies talked about Flash Gordon, who committed missions of protecting the earth and killing Skorpis in space. After he completed a task in space, Gordon came back as a celebrity among the astronauts. However, he has to go on another trip—which he said was the last trip. Before he went on the last trip, he proposed to Dale, but he met Ellta, a woman he fell in love with before. He didn’t get together with her again, but he was fallen on a weird planet. On the journey, he found more Skorpis and went on a battle with the Skorpis with his army. He faced a tension that he and his army might be killed there; it was Ellta who saved him and his staffs from the place to the earth. Upon their arrival, Ellta threatens Gordon to not marry his fiancé, or she would ask her army to destroy the earth. An incident happened that they found a lot of Skorpi spies on earth and so Ellta decided to move on and fight for another battle with the Skorpis, but it didn’t stop the new Skorpis landing on earth. 

I think the story plot is pretty common. It was mostly about the fighting against the Skorpis, and the romantic parts with his fiancé when he came back. The tension was usually when Gordon and his army was risking death before they killed the Skorpis. The art, on the other hand, is surprisingly very detailed, the characters’ faces are semi-life-like. However, I can imagine that it would be a popular story in the 50s because going into war, fighting against the enemies, and soldiers returning for the start of romantic stories are the prevalent themes. 

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

I think the information presented in this comics is by far one of the most critical knowledge I learned at school. It mainly talked about six aspects of comics, from its definition, how it works, why it engages the viewers naturally with its form, the language of comics, types of transitions between panels, and the six elements of comics. I think they will be beneficial in my future working in the art and design field, and I would like to summarize the ideas in the following paragraphs and write some of my thinking about them. 

Definition & essence 

Unlike the other arts or designs, comics was called sequential art. However, the name was very controversial, so the name has changed to sequential visual arts, juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, etc. People eventually decided to change it to a new name-- Comics. I think it is brilliant to create a whole new abstract new instead of a name describing the form or characteristics of comics, that way people can bring in their imagination of what comics is, and people can also change its form creatively. 

How it works and why it engages the viewers naturally? 

Comics are made of mostly pictorial icons, and they are less detailed than the real images. The simplified icons eliminate the unnecessaries, and it amplifies an effect by focusing on a specific part. With a simplified version of the icon, it also makes the viewer project themselves onto the character (the masking effect) and engages the viewers that way. Comics also engages us in both the realm of the concept such as the story and the realm of the senses such as the experience of driving a car (in which the car becomes part of our identity). It reminds me of Shaun Tan’s illustrations in The Arrival. The character arrived in a fictional city-- it is beautiful, complicated, and very much simplified to show the concept of his inner psychological world.

Comic as a language

The language of comics is seen as a pictorial vocabulary composed of words and icons, closure and gutter. A beautiful metaphor is that "visual iconography is the vocabulary, closure is the grammar; closure is the blood, gutter for the vein."It also mentions that to create a unified language of comics is to make pictures and words equal. It meant to make pictures more abstracted from "reality" and required greater levels of perception (more like words); while to make words are more direct and require lower levels of perception and are received faster (more like pictures). It reminds me of how most of the trends of advertisements are-- it needs both to complete the concepts. 

Types of Transitions Between Panels

There are six types of transitions between panels: moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, aspect-to-aspect, and non-sequitur. Most of the Comics in the West and the East has more action-to-action panels while Japanese tends to use more subject-to-subject and aspect-to-aspect panels than the Western comics. Action-to-action comics convey the concept in a concise and efficient way. On the other hand, aspect-to-aspect transitions present a mood or sense of space. Time seems to stand still in this quiet moments. I think some of the Japanese comics with that tells stories by switching different perspective gives the viewers to read from the “God's perspective,” someone who can transit from aspect to aspect. 

The six elements of comics

The six elements are purpose/idea, form, idiom, structure, craft, and surface. The book called in "the six steps of comics" while I would like to call it the six elements because I see it from an analytical perspective and I think the comic is complete with the six elements. Artists start from the surface to the craft, to the structure, the idiom--which is unique to the artist, and eventually, the artist picks either the conveying purpose/idea effectively or creating innovative form because doing both may result in "car crash" in the comics. However, when both of artist with innovative form or with purpose/idea, question themselves "why am I doing this?" to innovate from the most fundamental setting in Comis. 

I think the six elements help us to see beneath the crafts and discover the science behind comics and even design. When facing some difficulties in creating comics, I believe it can help us to analyze and assess our work in a systematic way and find a way to build up methodologies to revise our comics. I can't wait to try it on my work. 

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is a story about a man’s immigration to a new country. He had to separate from his family from home; he saw everything new—new words, new animals, new food, etc. He faced some struggles, but fortunately, he met his group of friends, he eventually found a job and reunion with his family at the end. The ending is very touching— his family, who eventually became the local people, helped the new immigrants, just like people who had helped them. I think The Arrival is a very compelling story. The novel depicted human interactions and character’s inner feelings very well.

One thing very interesting was the moment when the man arrived at the immigration, and right after he got the stamp on his book, he was put in a box, and the box flew further and further away in isolation. He wasn’t physically put in a box, but the graphic vividly portrayed his inner feeling. From my understanding, it expressed the fact that he came to a realization that he had left his homeland and the feeling of isolation became concrete in his heart. I think it portrayed his feeling very well when there is only graphics presented.
Another interesting example was when he first opened the luggage, the first thing he saw from the luggage was not his necessities but the scene of his family eating dinner at the table. It expressed the character’s psychological feelings directly. Furthermore, the first thing he put up in his room was not other but his family portrait, which clearly presented the character’s traits that he cared about his family a lot.
I used to think that psychological feeling is hard to express through graphics without the help of words. I am surprised how Shaun Tan presented the character’s psychological feelings by graphics. His way of surrealistic expression approach is also fascinating and is definitely something worth trying.