LITERATURE OF COMICS AND THE GRAPHIC NARRATIVE

Reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, I found it an interesting point McCloud made was when he said we see ourselves in cartoons. I never really took into consideration how we perceive ourselves in reality. Unless we're looking in a mirror, we never see ourselves. Our faces anyway, which is the most important part of a person. It's where we show emotion, see each other, and speak to each other. Just looking at another person in the eyes as they speak is intimate. To us, I think, it's what makes us us. But in our head, when we are aware of ourselves, our face is just an abstraction. I never thought of relating to a cartoon character more than a realistic image of another person. After thinking about it though, I do see the idea behind it in a way. If there is a comic of someone portraying something relatable with a stick figure with a face that's just dot eyes and a line for a mouth, it's easy to put your own face on it or picture yourself as that cartoon bec

The Arrival does a great job of telling a story without using words. For starters, all the images are in a clear sequential order, like the most important snapshot frames of a film were taken out to show direction and context. To compare this to something familiar to my major, it’s the same rule to storyboarding. What we draw should be necessary to tell the story and should be drawn clearly to understand the image. Each image in The Arrival clearly shows what is going on in the narrative, for example, who the main character is and what his goals are. He is the character because we see in almost every panel and and we start and end with his goal. We see that he has a family and he leaves them to find a way to give them a better life as he searches for work in an unfamiliar land. One aspect of the story that may be considered a challenge is showing what new things are without explaining them in words. The world that The Arrival takes place in is nothing like our own, however the artist u