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Tag Archives: leslie salas

Gutter Space #13: On Taking Webcomics Seriously

30 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Gutter Space

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gutter space, internet culture, leslie salas, social media, webcomics

Gutter Space #13 By Leslie Salas

 On Taking Webcomics Seriously

This week on Gutter Space, I don’t have a comic review for you. Instead, I’d like to take a moment to muse on something a talented former intern of mine mentioned. She saw my column on The Oatmeal, and noted that it was, in her words, “really refreshing to see him [The Oatmeal] considered as a serious storyteller rather than a just guy who makes funny pictures on the Internet.”

I don’t think she realized it, but my talented former intern really nailed what I’m trying to do here with Gutter Space. I review literary and independent (print) comics alongside webcomics. I put them both on equal footing, give them both equal critical attention. Each comic has something it does well—some element we can learn from to use in our own craft, regardless of the medium we work in. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look, and what we might take away from each of these things.

I like to think of this column/blog as a place where we can look between the cracks and find something valuable lying in the gutter. Indie comics and webcomics don’t really get as much hype and attention as more mainstream superhero comics have (at least here in the US), but I’m hoping we can build some awareness of the fact that there’s some really awesome stuff going on with independents publishers, imprints, and on the Interwebs.

The latter of which—comics created and “distributed” over the world wide web—are the most fascinating to me because of the sheer volume and diversity of what the Internet has to offer. There are many self-published webcomics which have amassed and retained a massive platform of readers and fans over several years. There are occasional updaters, there are beautiful projects that have been abandoned mid-plot, and there are archives of writers’ and artists’ personal and creative growth through their art. It’s a fascinating study in the evolution and power of the medium.

And perhaps what I enjoy most about studying webcomics is that they’ve become a staple of Internet-culture. We see rage-comics and memes; friends post links to poignant, funny, sad, or enlightening webcomics on Facebook and Twitter; the best ones go viral on Tumblr and Reddit. If you’re on the Internet (ahem), then you’re already exposed to webcomics in some way or another. So if this field is becoming such a large part of are continually shifting and growing culture—why shouldn’t we be taking it seriously?

 ___________

Leslie Salas (Photo by Ashley Inguanta)

Leslie Salas writes fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and comics. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute. In addition to being an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Leslie also serves as an assistant editor for The Florida Review, a graphic nonfiction editorial assistant for Sweet: A Literary Confection, and a regular contributing artist for SmokeLong Quarterly.

Gutter Space #12: Trauma and Watercolors

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

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David Small, gutter space, leslie salas, Stitches

Gutter Space #12 by Leslie Salas

Trauma and Watercolors: Stitches, by David Small

Many of us have our own ways of dealing with stress and trauma. Some of us paint, write, sing, play an instrument. Others may run, play a sport, go to the gym. And some turn to cigarettes, booze, brothels. For David Small, though, he deals with a traumatic medical condition and his dysfunctional home though a blank canvas and his pen.

In his watercolor memoir, Stitches, Small envelops us in his world of lies, deceit, horror, and loneliness, and the escape into illustration.

This book is undeniably beautiful—and rightfully so. The author is an award-winning author and illustrator of picture books for children. When I first saw this graphic novel as my friends and I browsed through the (then) small section of sequential art, I flipped through the pages, wondering what they would hold.

I could not put it down. I sat on the carpeted floor and devoured the memoir while my friends left me, and came back, and left again before I finished. And I had to sit. And wait. Before I was okay enough to try and find them.

Given Small’s profession as an artist and illustrator, it makes sense that much of his story would be told without words. Small relies on the power of quiet images strung together, allowing the reader to make his or her own sense of the sequence.

This memoir is filled with many things. Anger. Frustration. Misery. The struggle of overcoming barriers, or being oneself, of being heard. But this memoir is not pedantic. It does not ask me to feel sorry for him, it does not tell me to loathe a particular character. It is the essence of “showing,” rather than “telling,” and therein lies it’s power. With all of the sadness and all of the hardships, there is also hope, and a tentative trust for the future.

Read, and find out why.

 ___________

Leslie Salas (Photo by Ashley Inguanta)

Leslie Salas writes fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and comics. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute. In addition to being an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Leslie also serves as an assistant editor for The Florida Review, a graphic nonfiction editorial assistant for Sweet: A Literary Confection, and a regular contributing artist for SmokeLong Quarterly.

Gutter Space #11: Imagination as a Coping Mechanism in Comics Essays

16 Wednesday Oct 2013

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gutter space, leslie salas, The Oatmeal

Gutter Space #11 by Leslie Salas

Imagination as a Coping Mechanism in Comics Essays

Perhaps many of you have heard of an Internet entity known as The Oatmeal, a man (Matthew Inman) who writes funny webcomics, draws posters everyone wants on their cubicle walls, and even fundraised enough money to save Nikola Tesla’s lab and turn it into a museum. The Oatmeal’s most recent endeavor has been to rename the holiday that occurred on Monday to something a bit more appropriate, but that’s not what I’d like to focus on for this week’s edition of Gutter Space. Instead, I’d like to talk about one of his older essays, which happens to be my favorite, entitled:

 

 The title itself is intriguing, but when paired with the first three panels, you realize that The Oatmeal intends to take you on a ride.

 

The Oatmeal braids this story of this broken cat (and fifteen other cats) with the chilling tale of how he was woken up early one morning to discover that his house was on fire.

 

The Oatmeal compares horrible events with ideas from his imagination that take the edge off reality and to cope with extenuating circumstances. He uses a powerful refrain throughout his essay: “This is not the truth, but it’s how I like to remember them,” to ground us as readers into the playful and humorous imagination of the speaker, and the knowledge that the speaker recognizes the truth but willfully chooses to assign his feelings to an alternate reality.

“When Your House is Burning Down, You Should Brush Your Teeth” is a touching essay that bridges the thin, narrow line between fiction and nonfiction in order to tell a compelling and heartfelt story of humor, danger, and love. The quality of the storytelling is literary, and showcases the power that a talented sequential artist can yield.

If you’d like more from The Oatmeal, take a look at his books.

___________

Leslie Salas (Photo by Ashley Inguanta)

Leslie Salas writes fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and comics. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute. In addition to being an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Leslie also serves as an assistant editor for The Florida Review, a graphic nonfiction editorial assistant for Sweet: A Literary Confection, and a regular contributing artist for SmokeLong Quarterly.

Gutter Space #10: Narration in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

09 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Gutter Space

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Alison Bechdel, Fun Home, gutter space, leslie salas

Gutter Space #10 by Leslie Salas

Narration in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Fun Home

 Many of the graphic novels that I’ve talked about so far on Gutter Space are missing something that Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, excels in: narration. And not just normal narration in captions—heavy narration. Narration that accompanies nearly every single panel.

Bechdel’s choice makes sense with her storytelling style. Since her graphic novels (plural because I’m including Are You My Mother? in this, even though I haven’t reviewed it yet) are memoirs, the juxtaposition of the narration and the images in the panels allows for an interesting visual presentation of what many non-fiction writers refer to as the “double-I”—the writer behind the desk thinking retrospectively while also striving to be true to his or herself at the time of the event.


Most simply put, Fun Home is the story of Bechdel’s coming-of-age as a young lesbian along with her discovery that her father was also queer. Combine this journey of self-discovery with the news of her father’s sudden death, and there’s a lot of room for Bechdel to think and reminisce and try to make sense of that particular time in her life.

This need to stop, think, and reevaluate lends itself well to the comics format—especially one with a great deal of narration. One can focus on a particular image or scene while exploring multiple narrative threads. The image itself keeps the musing together, while the captioning of the words allows the thoughts to exist as their own discrete entities. By playing with the placement of the captions on the page, one can affect the pacing of the story and the speed in which one’s readers traverse through the text.

Fun Home reads like literary nonfiction, but offers what prose alone cannot: the ability to engage a reader subconsciously not only through the power and meaning behind words, but by conveying the reality of the writer/artist through her sequential art—her own artistic representation of her life.

We live in an increasingly visually-saturated world, and the graphic memoir feeds into our innate abilities to make sense of pictures put together. Bechdel goes one step further with her overarching narrative, guiding us through her thoughts, but also showing us what she saw and letting us judge her situations on our own.

___________

Leslie Salas (Photo by Ashley Inguanta)

Leslie Salas writes fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and comics. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute. In addition to being an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Leslie also serves as an assistant editor for The Florida Review, a graphic nonfiction editorial assistant for Sweet: A Literary Confection, and a regular contributing artist for SmokeLong Quarterly.

Gutter Space #9: Flashbacks in Will Eisner’s A Family Matter

02 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Gutter Space

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graphic novels, gutter space, leslie salas, Will Eisner

Gutter Space #9 by Leslie Salas

Flashbacks in Will Eisner’s A Family Matter

We’re going a little bit old school this week by taking a look a cartooning legend Will Eisner’s A Family Matter.

Before we jump in, I’m going to take a moment to be honest. As you can see by my previous Gutter Space posts, I mostly focus on contemporary (and rather mainstream) American independent comics and webcomics (that aren’t superhero comics—that’s Sean Ironman’s domain). But besides reading the classic American funnies in the newspaper, I wasn’t really exposed to American comics until more recently. I got interested in sequential art by reading Japanese manga. (We can get more into whether or not my obsession with manga may or may not have started with my obsession with Sailor Moon at a later time. See Mark Pursell’s post for a similar sentiment.)

I bring this up because A Family Matter is the first Eisner graphic novel I’ve ever read. And because of the heavy contemporary manga influence in my background, my approach to understanding his sequential art comes from more of an outsider’s perspective.

Over the span of 72 pages, Eisner covers a 24-hour period in what seems like a normal family’s life. We readers get to know each of the family members in the present as they make their way to their father’s 90th birthday party. But we also get snippets of each of the family members’ troubled past with their father and each other through flashbacks. The placement and braiding of these scenes further informs the particular nuances of this family’s dysfunction.

These flashbacks often are presented side-by-side with present action, offering contrast and introspection to the interactions between the family members. The flashbacks are drawn with what seems like a wispy hand, less detailed than the present, with fuzzy shading around them, functioning similarly to thought bubbles. The result is a punchy, immersive storyline that fully engages the reader in the conflict of past and present influencing the future.

A Family Matter is a quick read that exhibits technical mastery in many areas. Boldly inked with soft grey watercolor shading, the art itself is typical of American cartooning in the late 90s. There’s some great work going on here, especially with narrative braiding, but I’m still not sure how I feel about the story as a whole.

Yes, the story is rich with details and provides a thought-provoking ending. There are no captions at all in the comic (except for an epigraph at the very beginning), so the story is driven entirely by drawings and dialogue. The work undoubtedly showcases Eisner as a master of the form, but I still feel like something’s missing—or maybe that it’s trying too hard.

The story itself lacks the complex sophistication of many contemporary graphic novels. It really just feels like a collection of dysfunctional-family clichés. A daughter catches her father with a strumpet and becomes the favorite after she promises to keep his secret. The oldest son becomes an outcast because he refuses to follow in his father’s footsteps. A woman sleeps with her sister’s husband. Everyone has daddy issues, and sucks up to Dad in the hopes that they’ll get a cut of his substantial inheritance. And so on. We’ve heard these stories before.

I’m not sure it is fair to draw this kind of parallel given that Eisner was on the forefront of establishing comics as a long-form medium for storytelling. He practically invented the graphic novel, so of course the medium itself will undergo substantial changes in just a few decades. Were these themes as prevalent in literature in 1998? Probably. But what about in comics? Maybe. But maybe not presented in this manner. And maybe it’s just my MFA talking, being snooty about storytelling quality and what may or may not be considered fresh and literary.

Either way, there are definitely great things to learn from A Family Matter, and I’d certainly suggest it as a good short read. Check it out and let me know what you think?

___________

Leslie Salas (Photo by Ashley Inguanta)

Leslie Salas writes fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and comics. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute. In addition to being an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Leslie also serves as an assistant editor for The Florida Review, a graphic nonfiction editorial assistant for Sweet: A Literary Confection, and a regular contributing artist for SmokeLong Quarterly.

Gutter Space #7: Hybrid Comics and Prose

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Gutter Space

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Allie Brosh, Comics, gutter space, Hybrid forms, Hyperbole and a Half, Illustrations, leslie salas, Nonfiction, Prose, The God of Cake

Gutter Space by Leslie Salas

Comics and Prose: Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half

Hyperbole and a Half is one of my favorite things on the Internet. Written and illustrated by Allie Brosh, this site mostly comprises of personal essays presented as a combination of standard prose (typed out sentences) and child-like MS Paint drawings.

As the title of her blog implies, the narrative style is often hyperbolic in nature. Brosh’s art style is deliberate. Her illustrations are essential to her storytelling—without them, most of the meaning (and humor!) of her essays would be lost. The drawings, carefully constructed to convey her hyperbolic tone, leads the reader to believe and understand what might otherwise be misunderstood as clearly false or ridiculous.

For instance, let’s take a look at her essay, “The God of Cake.”

In this essay, Brosh talks about an incident that happened when she was four years old, involving a decadent cake her mother made for her grandfather.

As you can see, the illustration is a combination of simplistic images and complex ones. The girl in pink (4-year-old Allie) and the woman in orange (her mother), don’t have a lot to them. Their arms are sticks, they don’t even have hands or noses. But small details like the color they wear and their hair style make these characters easily identifiable throughout the blog. The facial expressions are very detailed and clear. Mother is chastising the daughter. Daughter is enjoying cake.

And look at the detail on the cake!

That’s a marshmallow giraffe and elephant on top! Definitely a specific cake. And since the cake is the object of the protagonist’s obsession, that’s why there’s a great deal of detail involved in the illustration and presentation of the cake.

Because she had tasted the cake earlier, sugared-up 4-year-old Allie’s mission for the rest of the day was to try and eat the cake.

Brosh uses techniques such as repetition and blurring (alone or in sequence) to represent the hyperactive state of her 4-year-old self.

In stark contrast, the prose sections provide an adult’s retrospective account of the details. Brosh says: “I had tasted cake and there was no going back. My tiny body had morphed into a writhing mass of pure tenacity encased in a layer of desperation. I would eat all of the cake or I would evaporate from the sheer power of my desire to eat it.“

The balance between capturing the child’s voice and perspective as well as knowledge and wisdom of the writer-at-the-desk is a mastery of the “double-I” in nonfiction. The self as the character on the page, coupled with the self as the writing narrator, looking back on the event at a point later in time.

By combining both the prosaic narrative form with carefully crafted illustrations into a hybrid mode of storytelling, Brosh’s illustrated essays are engaging, introspective, and—quite frankly—hilarious.

Brosh’s first book, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened, should be available by the end of October. It will feature 50% new content—and will become one of my new favorite things on my bookshelf. Hopefully yours, as well.

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Leslie Salas (Photo by Ashley Inguanta)

Leslie Salas writes fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and comics. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute. In addition to being an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Leslie also serves as an assistant editor for The Florida Review, a graphic nonfiction editorial assistant for Sweet: A Literary Confection, and a regular contributing artist for SmokeLong Quarterly.

Gutter Space #6: Art Spiegelman’s Maus

11 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Art, Comic Books, Gutter Space

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anthropomorphism, Art Spiegelman, gutter space, leslie salas, masks, Maus, Nazis, symbolism, WWII

Gutter Space #6 by Leslie Salas

The Mice Behind the Masks: Art Spiegelman’s Maus

Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a framed narrative graphic novel in which the relationship between the author, Artie, and his father, Vladek, is exposed and intertwined with the author’s attempt to capture and relate his father’s experience as a persecuted Jew during the Holocaust.  The major conflicts explored in the outer frame of the novel involve the Artie’s contemporary struggle to understand his father’s stereotypical pragmatism as well as the Artie getting stuck in the middle of the bickering between his father and his step-mother, Mala.

 

The inner story, taking place in Poland just before and during World War II, mainly surrounds the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland as experienced by Vladek in his roles as a soldier, husband, father, and son. Throughout Spiegelman’s Maus, the importance of prayer is noted and the mother’s, Anja’s, mental instability recorded.  The definition of friendship, the value of wealth, and the importance of health are questioned. The sheer cruelty of the Nazis is exposed, and the reader is made to bear witness to the horrors Jews endured under Hitler’s regime.

The element of craft that I find central to the book lies in an aspect of the graphic storytelling: the representation of different races as different anthropomorphic animals.  Simply put: the Jews are mice, the Poles are pigs, the Nazis are cats, and the Americans are dogs.

These representations are heavy in symbolism and have multiple connotations.  At a basic level of understanding the hierarchical structure of animals, it makes sense that the Nazis are cats since cats hunt mice, and that the Americans should be dogs, since dogs chase cats.  But there is more than just that.  Cats are known as being cunning, clever, graceful, and swift.  They have a reputation for sass and vanity (the joke “Cats don’t have owners, they have staff,” comes to mind). Dogs are generally known for their unconditional love and loyalty.  Pigs are known for their intelligence, but can also connote dirt and scheming (Animal Farm, anyone?).   And mice?  Small, helpless.  I’m reminded of nursery rhyme, “Three Blind Mice.”

But it isn’t just what’s beneath the surface, it’s also how Spiegelman uses these anthropomorphic characters.  The animals make it easy for the reader to quickly distinguish race, regardless of the clothes they are wearing or who is who.

With visual storytelling, some will argue that it is best to keep all of the characters as stock-looking as possible, with less defining features, so that they become more relatable to the reader. Clothes, glasses, and cigarettes distinguish person from person, but without human characteristics like hair and specific bone structure, each of the characters is a blank slate where the reader is free to fill in details themselves and make the reading experience more personal.

If the reader has experienced a situation similar to this one, the lack of detail in the characters allows for a stronger connection between the reader and the work, because it is likely that the reader will put himself or herself in the character’s shoes, and the reader will relive that moment through the graphic novel.

If one contrasts this with Spiegelman’s comic within Maus, “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” the characters are all drawn to look just like themselves.  This no longer becomes a general story that anyone can relive, but instead is a highly specific tale about Art, Vladek, and how they specifically dealt with Anja’s death.

Since Artie’s father’s story about his experience in the Holocaust is one of many, many, many sad stories, I find Spiegelman’s choice to keep faces general is powerful for readers, particularly if they had family members involved, or were involved themselves.

The ambiguity is also characteristic of the degradation of memory over time.  Coupled with the fact that the story is told by Spiegelman telling it through Vladek, there is no way it could be kept exactly correct.  Since the characters do not look like humans, this takes off a lot of the pressure to get everything exactly right.

What I find particularly clever is Spiegelman’s use of masks to illustrate deception of identity.  For instance, at one point, Vladek sneaks onto the train back to the Reich, the circular frame that bleeds into the next one clearly show’s Vladek’s deception—a pig mask, even the string and bow are visible on the back of his head, and the hat hides his ears!  It is only four frames later, when Vladek is hiding in the closet, that we see his mouse ears and him holding the mask very clearly, contemplating it.

This deception works highly effectively—not only for the characters in the novel, but also for the reader, for now the anthropomorphic characteristics are also signaled as real, identifying markers.  It adds a level of subtle depth and complexity to the story that I find fascinating.

Spiegelman’s combination of words from his father’s actual storytelling as well as their clever manifestation to the graphic media in a logical and essential format is simply brilliant.  Spiegelman’s art is at once simplistic and detailed, and Spiegelman’s use of a simple device like a mask is so impressive to me because it ends up being so crucial to the telling of the story.

___________

Leslie Salas (Photo by Ashley Inguanta)

Leslie Salas writes fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and comics. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute. In addition to being an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Leslie also serves as an assistant editor for The Florida Review, a graphic nonfiction editorial assistant for Sweet: A Literary Confection, and a regular contributing artist for SmokeLong Quarterly.

Gutter Space #4: Worldbuilding in Megan Kelso’s Artichoke Tales

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Gutter Space

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Artichoke Tales, coming-of-age, Fiction, Graphic Novel, gutter space, leslie salas, Megan Kelso, nudity, vulnerability, Worldbuilding

Gutter Space #4 by Leslie Salas

Worldbuilding in Megan Kelso’s Artichoke Tales

 Worldbuilding—whether in graphic novels or prose novels—is the long and arduous task of creating and enriching social, cultural, and economic setting of a narrative. Worldbuilding is done best when it is invisible to the reader. When an author establishes a foreign setting through the storytelling itself (and not in awkward, stilted dialogue or blatant, uncrafted listing), a reader’s growing understanding of how the world functions becomes a natural element of the reading experience.

Graphic novels are uniquely suited to establishing a great deal of this kind of detail in the span of a few panels thanks to the power of visual literacy. One of the best examples of worldbuilding done well in the medium of sequential art is Megan Kelso’s Artichoke Tales.

Artichoke Tales

This graphic novel, which took Kelso six years to complete, follows the coming-of-age story of Brigitte Quicksand, an apothecary girl from the South who has fallen in love with a soldier boy from the North. Because she and the boy are from opposite ends of the continent and have very different backgrounds and cultures, they are forced to part ways and say goodbye.

Frustrated by her lack of understanding about why people from the North and South—both of whom have artichoke-looking hair—don’t get along, Brigitte asks her grandmother to tell her about the history of the continent.

Brigitte’s quest for understanding and her desire to reconnect with the boy from the North serves as the vehicle that propels a comprehensive account of this history of the Artichoke people and the consequences of a civil war.

Although the reader goes into Artichoke Tales knowing nothing about the world the Artichoke people live in, by the end of this epic tale, one has a comprehensive understanding of their world—and how it mimics our own.

As a side note, one of my favorite things about Megan Kelso as a cartoonist is that she is unafraid to draw provocative or embarrassing scenes.

Throughout Artichoke Tales, there are illustrations of urination, birth, plenty of sexual encounters, and even of a certain member of royalty experiencing gastric distress.

This inclusion of characters in nude and/or vulnerable positions adds to the realistic effect of good worldbuilding (and good fiction in general). We see these characters in their natural environments, at their best, and at their worst. We get to know them, we recognize ourselves in them, and this is what touches us as readers of good writing.

___________

Leslie Salas (Photo by Ashley Inguanta)

Leslie Salas writes fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and comics. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute. In addition to being an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Leslie also serves as an assistant editor for The Florida Review, a graphic nonfiction editorial assistant for Sweet: A Literary Confection, and a regular contributing artist for SmokeLong Quarterly.

Gutter Space #3: Pushing the Boundaries between Comics and Animation in Randall Munroe’s XKCD

21 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Gutter Space

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

animation, astronomy, biology, botany, dialogue, gutter space, leslie salas, linguistics, Randall Munroe, reader interaction, science, stick figures, web comic, xkcd

Gutter Space #3 by Leslie Salas

Pushing the Boundaries between Comics and Animation

in Randall Munroe’s XKCD

No discussion of comics on the Internet would be complete without taking a look at Randall Munroe’s xkcd. Self-described as “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” xkcd is known by its substantial following as “the smart stick figure comic” with seemingly simple illustrations conveying more thought-provoking themes, often referring to current events in fields such a s science, literature, Internet culture, and popular culture. One of the most fascinating aspects of xkcd that sets it apart from other webcomics is Munroe’s ability to embrace technology and provide a unique reading experience to his readers that would not be possible in print. To highlight Munroe’s unique use of the webcomics medium in xkcd, this discussion will focus on how Munroe blurs the lines between comics and animation in his 1190th comic, “Time.”

At first glance, “Time” does not seem to be about anything exciting—but that’s because the url only shows the last panel in an epic sequence of continual updates over the course of several months. While at first the changes between the comic panels seemed mundane and simple, eventually the story grew to capture readers’ wonder and challenge their deduction skills as Munroe left hints about the setting of the comic through the two protagonists’ interactions with plants, animals, topography, abandoned residences, and shaky interactions with people from a different culture. Munroe trusts his readers to be smart and he takes no shortcuts with respect to researching and presenting his story.

Perhaps two of the most impressive undertakings of “Time” are the portrayal of a character having difficulty speaking a language and the illustration of the night sky. Munroe’s deliberate blotting-out of words in dialogue serves as a visual representation of garbled speech, giving the reader a similar difficult in understanding as the protagonists may have encountered. The reader only gets bits and pieces of the translator’s speech but learns the gravity of the situation with the help of context clues from the other two protagonists. This kind of visual depiction of an audible struggle would be impossible in a traditional prose medium, but feels natural and makes sense in the realm of this webcomic.

The starfield Munroe draws and animates clearly shows the main characters silhouetted against an unfamiliar Milky Way. The movement of the stars in the background mimics the movement of our own night sky so deliberately that is serves as a hint that time period of the comic is not contemporary. The subtle changes from frame to frame would probably be lost in a traditional print comic, but with each of the panels in “Time” being set on top of one another in a sort of slow animation, the differences appear more obviously and readers gain a distinct sense of movement and the passage of time.

As Munroe describes in a blog post about this epic project:

When the comic first went up, it just showed two people sitting on a beach. Every half hour (and later every hour), a new version of the comic appeared, showing the figures in different positions. … And as Time unfolded, readers gradually figured out that it was a story, set far in the future, about one of the strangest phenomena in our world… All told, I drew 3,099 panels. I animated a starfield, pored over maps and research papers, talked with biologists and botanists, and created a plausible future language for readers to try to decode. … To the intrepid, clever, sometimes crazy readers who followed it the whole way through, watching every pixel change and catching every detail: Thank you. This was for you.

You can watch/read the entire sequence of “Time” at your own pace, view a 40-minute video of the comic, or read reviews by Wired and The Verge. It’s well worth the time.

___________

Leslie Salas (Photo by Ashley Inguanta)

Leslie Salas writes fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and comics. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute. In addition to being an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Leslie also serves as an assistant editor for The Florida Review, a graphic nonfiction editorial assistant for Sweet: A Literary Confection, and a regular contributing artist for SmokeLong Quarterly.

Gutter Space #1: Why Focus on Comics-That-Aren’t-Superhero-Comics?

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Art, Comic Books, Gutter Space, manga

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bandes dessinés, comic books, Douglas Wolk, gag strips, graphic narrative, gutter space, horace, independent comics, indie comics, Justin R. Hall, leslie salas, propaganda, Reading Comics, rene magritte, Scott McCloud, Sequential art, Simonides of Ceos, the new yorker, The Treachery of Images, Tijuana Bibles, Understanding Comics, visual literacy, webcomics

Gutter Space #1 by Leslie Salas

Why Focus on Comics-That-Aren’t-Superhero-Comics?

Comics as a medium has a richer and more involved history than many people recognize or remember. Comics analyst Douglas Wolk explains in Reading Comics “the argument about the between relationship between painting and poetry, the generic classical terms for image-making and word-assembling, has been going on for a long time. The earliest people to try and figure it out concluded that painting and poetry were basically different forms of the same thing.”

Reading-Comics

Simonides of Ceos’ formulation poema pictura loquens, picture poema silens aptly illustrates the point that “poetry is a verbal picture; painting is a silent poetry.” (Horace later reduced this to ut pictura poesis, “as is painting, so is poetry.”) This is mostly true in the broad sense that both are ways of representing perception: comics functions as a successful marriage of the visual and lingual.

The medium of comics also goes by many names such as graphic narrative and visual storytelling. In light of this muddled nomenclature, let me clarify that by saying “comics,” which seems to be the most common term, I specifically refer to “sequential art,” as defined by cartoonist Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

UnderstandingComics

Comics started their ascension into literature around World War II in the form of propaganda ads: some sort of illustration with a caption below it. Think of the captioned cartoons in The New Yorker or René Magritte’s famous painting, The Treachery of Images, with the painting of a pipe and the caption, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”—“This is not a pipe.”

Margritti this is not a pipe

From there, the art form evolved into gag strips, like those you would see in the newspaper. The strips took a pornographic turn with Tijuana Bibles to help soldiers overseas needing entertainment (or as psy-ops propaganda leaflets to convince reduce soldier’s morale),

Tijuana Bibles

and even mainstream comics still had a political agenda (see the cover for Captain America #1, where Captain America is punching Hitler in the face).

The political content of American comics caused them to be cut off from Europe and Asia (Axis vs. Allied Powers). As a result, two other comic traditions, Japanese manga and Franco-Belgian bandes dessinés, evolved independently. It is only now, several decades after the end of WWII, that all three styles of comics flourish worldwide.

Comics critic Justin R. Hall notes that “comics meets [people’s] sensibilities on a cognitive level.” We live in a visually saturated world, so many people of all ages are naturally drawn to the combination of words and pictures. Reading comics, however, requires a different type of literacy that incorporates not only words, but visuals such as movement between panels, line of sight, and gutter closure.

By reviewing independent comics and webcomics that aren’t superhero comics, my goal is to draw attention to some of the interesting and effective techniques used by cartoonists all over the world. This can help develop visual literacy, identify various narrative structures, provide a dynamic view of cultures, and prompt interdisciplinary study. Plus—it’s interesting and fun!

And if you’re sad that I’m excluding superhero comics, check out Sean Ironman’s column, Heroes Never Rust. He’s got you covered.

___________

Leslie Salas

Leslie Salas writes fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and comics. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute. In addition to being an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Leslie also serves as an assistant editor for The Florida Review, a graphic nonfiction editorial assistant for Sweet: A Literary Confection, and a regular contributing artist for SmokeLong Quarterly.

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