Graphic Novels

Who doesn't like comic books? Anyone think they're for kids? There is a big misconception about comics that has slowly been corrected over the last 20 years. Beginning with The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and continuing the tradition up to now, these graphic novels have shifted perceptions with the darker themes, more graphic fights, and more adult decisions to be made these comics began to make it ok for adults to like comics.
DKR and Watchmen both deal with the breakdown of the ideal of the comic book hero.  DKR written by Frank Miller is a slightly more gentle approach, breaking only a few of the standing traditions of the Comic Hero. For instance, Bruce Wayne has been allowed to give up the mask and age. He is an old man, living in a time that doesn't want the "real" him, the Batman. With his eventual forfeiture of the life of Bruce Wayne, he departs from the normative life and become this anti-heroic figure that goes farther than he sometimes should.
Watchmen takes on the modernist hero concept in a more cynical way. The total inversion of the Super Hero and the concept of what makes a hero is subverted with deep and rather dark implications.

When I was assigned to make a comic for Dr. Williams' class I took to the idea with gusto. The comic I created was sort of a non-narrative story, simply a guy watching TV, becoming increasingly frustrated, and finally turning off the set. Much is communicated in comics, in one of three modes. The text, the images, and the panels themselves all communicate something. While the first two are fairly obvious, one might ask, how do the panels themselves communicate anything? Well, as the panels contain the story they become part of the image. When panels are small and set close together it makes the page look busy, cluttered and intense. It builds tension and allows for an emotionally tense setup for a scene. Naturally the converse is true as well.

In my comic, many of the panels are filled with static,  denoting a change in channel. several pages are filled with a lot of the static, building an atmosphere that feels fast paced if not completely frantic. The images that I used were eclectic to say the least, with the unifying factor being the filter i used to give the images a grainy acrylic comic style. The tone only settles when we approach the final pages and we see the ending of a detective story,  settling on a pulp 40's style, using images of Humphrey Bogart from ˆThe Maltese Falcon. All in all, every part of a comic communicates something, much like the cuts and edits to film, the frames of a comic can show or hide many things. As always, The Plot Moves On.