Understanding Comic

     Scott McCloud solved a question I came across all the time but never got an answer to: why are the characters so cartoony? Not all, but most comic characters are designed in a simple style. For years I thought it was only the choice of style and possibly to lower the workload of comic artists. At least, as an animator, that's what I do to turn in the work on time. The simpler a character is, the less work we have to do. However, on the other hand, this rule can't apply to the rest of the comic creation process - the backgrounds are full of details and sometimes even photorealistic (especially in Japanese Anime). That made me wonder for a long time. Why spend so much time on the things readers are most likely to ignore than working on the characters who we play close attention to?

     I eventually got my answer from the book: characters were designed simply to assist audience involvement. I found it quite unreasonable to adopt this theory at first. Simplicity can look fake, shouldn't our eyes first attracted to the realistic look of things? Throughout the human history many artists trained themselves tirelessly to achieve the skill to draw realistically. The more real the better the viewer adopts as the reality. In comic books, we must go the other way around. Even though photorealistic characters with fine details may be very much appreciated by its craftsmanship,  but it made the reader less efficient to relate to them. The more detail, the more our eyes identify as "other". In this case, it explains why backgrounds are drawn much more complicated than the characters. We want to perceive everything besides the main character as the "others". We want to become the protagonist.

     After all, it's quite impressive to learn that our mind can relate to any form of art, no matter if it's realistic or not.  Just like Scot McCloud said, we are sucked into this "vacuum" called comic.  We see ourselves on the other side of the book, and that's what made comic such interesting media.

The Arrival by Shuan Tan

     It's always critical of how a story grabs the reader's attention at the start. A lot of authors sell the "meat" right off at the beginning. "The Arrival" did just the opposite, the story starts off with something we commonly see in everyday life and progresses into a completely different world of wildness.This is also one of the most fasinating part of the book -  the big contrast of life.

     We can see this compare and contrast pattern throughout the entire book. Tan is repeatedly comparing the events taken place in the story. For example, the layout of the first page and last page are exactly the same, but the content of the images has changed. The paper crane changed into a paper creature, the pot changed into a food of the new world, the newspaper changed into another language and etc. All of the elements emphasize that life has been the same way, but better. Tan also compare and contrasted the  experiences of the different people we saw throughout the book, which in my understanding, are to emphasize the same thing. The young lady who originally work as a slave now gained her freedom. The couple escaped from the giants now built their little family in the new world, with their child. The old man found his peace away from the war. At the end, when a foreign girl came to ask for directions, the scene immediately reflected the main character's experience when he first came to the new world. The scene lifted my emotion to a higher level because I know the story is going to continue on with someone else.

     The contrast is the major component which brings the reader's feelings into the book. Only if when we see the bad side, we see the goodness of life. I believe this is what made the book so interesting.