So, this week has really had my mind in the gutter. Specifically the shapes of gutters in comics. And since we’ve been talking about Donald Duck and those comics, it’s been really interesting where my mind jumps with other panel breaks and how those are seen as serious versus funny etc. The discussion in class and the assignment for Wednesday sort of helped this thought process because I love comics and have read them for a long time, but I’ve never thought in terms of how paneling and theory in comics helps push it along.
It really seems amazing how the visual aspects of the panels we read and the framing do affect the subconscious impression one can get of a comic until you’re forced to sit down and look at the thing you organically processed and read through it again. To see the little things you don’t necessarily think through otherwise. I’m excited to see how this contributes to how I experience Funhouse, since I’ve never read it before but now have a lot more comic theory than even how I reread Watchmen.
The comparisons and jumps that class discussions have brought to me this semester are extremely interesting and I am really interested in continuing to look for the visual contributions paired next to the written ones and how that encourages more interpretations of panels than a normal novel would. And this also comes on the tail of finishing up my web comic with my group and experiencing how difficult it is to write for a panel, and how to choose the art and what is shown and how long it took the artist in our group to experiment to show what we wanted as a group the reader to experience.