The Adventures of Tintin

     

     Tintin took us all over the world, traveling from places to places, discovering new adventures and solving more mysterious. We followed his foot steps exploring around the world on paper, and he never fails providing surprises on each adventure. To accommodate great stories there must be great protagonists. Herge really did a great job on building the personalities of the characters. They all have strong characteristics. It is incredible how the characters appeal to us. Certain character speaks a certain way, act a certain way, and express him/her in a certain way. We can easily tell which dialogue was spoken by which character without seeing the actual illustration - just like identifying a person's voice.

     The captain for example, is the most unique person among the characters of the adventures of Tintin. He has a big beard and a big body. He is always expressed in an exaggerated facial expression with exaggerated gestures. He loves whiskies, and he always mess up because of it. So the beer bottle became a symbol for him just like the big round ears became a symbol for Micky Mouse. These characteristics engrave into our mind, they are what brought the story to life.

     Tintin, the soul of the story, is a boy with all the good natures of human. He is smart, brave and adventurous. He has a strong sense of justice, he is not afraid of anything, he can do all kinds of stuff such as riding the horse, fixing machines, operating cars, planes, and even the tank. In the story of Tintin, there's always a good side and a bad side. Tintin can always fight off the bad guys - just like the golden rule of many other stories: evil can never prevail the good. Tintin is an idol because he can do all the things we wanted to do and he has all the characteristics we dreamed of.  Herge in fact, created a superhero rather than a human. Only this superhero, Tintin, can lead us into the most exciting adventures of all time.

Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay

     Unlike most comic books we read today, Winsor McCay's works were following a certain form and norm. Little Sammy Sneeze, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, and Little Nemo in Slumberland all started the story differently but end with the similar ending (earlier Little Nemo comic even started off with the same beginning). Winsor McCay told the same story over and over again, but just differently. What really impressed me is his ability to fit so much imagination and information into such simple form of storytelling. He created a world way beyond our imagination on single pages of weekly comic newspapers.

     Not only does Winsor McCay's story follow a particular norm, his drawings did the same thing as well. The stories are drawn on a steady pace, one follow another, more like an animatic storyboard. We spend about the same time on each panel, even the dialogues between the characters tend to be balanced throughout the panels. The panels are pretty much the same size throughout, except for couple that contains more action and characters. McCay expanded the size of the panele rather than shrinking the characters. There are no close-up or medium shots, the characters are always the same size, drawn from head to toe. It almost look like the characters are walking through the panels as we are reading. Most of the feelings are expressed through body languages, the characters had barely any expression on their faces. Due to the fact because they are always put into a wide shot, their faces are so small that we only can see two dots for the eyes and a line for the mouth.

(steady pace)

(barely any facial expression)

     It is quite obvious that McCay didn't pay too much attention into expressing the feelings of the characters, rather, he focused heavily on the other objective elements such as the backgrounds, which are essential to form the world he created. McCay wants to express the "Slumberland" more than little Nemo himself.

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.