Notes Towards Day 19: Mapping Time Itself

Shayna's notes!

"To grasp the essence of comics I think it's helpful -- to begin seeing comics
as this. An artist's map of time itself." (Scott McCloud, via ShaynaS)

_____________
I. coursekeeping
no notetakers for today (aaurgh!?...
a pause to consider alternatives)

Shayna's notes!

For Tuesday, please read June 3, 2008 The NYTimes article:
"'Sisters' Colleges See a Bounty in the Middle East,"
and Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
(rave advance review from spleenfiend!)

For Thursday, Persepolis II: The Story of a Return

For Tuesday after: the movie, Persepolis (95 min.):
can this work w/out my orchestrating a group showing??
(copies @ HC and Swat also; Netflix; TLA...)

couple weeks away from needing access to
2 classes' worth of House, M.D....who is on this? 

Anyone attend the talk @ HC Tuesday afternoon on
Breaking the Frame: Comics and the Art of Social Transformation ?

What I learned on Tuesday morning
(thanks, aseidman, for the loan of a friend...)

was that Scott McCloud's VERY impressive description of the
difference between easily PERCEIVED images and
words, which need more work to be RECEIVED (=decoded)



was emphatically NOT an accurate
description of your all's experience:
"pictures were in the way," 
"I ignored the images,"
"they took me out of my comfort zone,"
"I didn't know how to read them," 
"they DISTRACTED from the text,"
"on principle I DON'T LIKE HAVING pictures..."

THIS WAS NOT A DESCRIPTION OF INSTANTANEOUS PERCEPTION!
???? (explanations for this divergence/dissonance????)

rmeyers' afterthoughts on how we read:
I might be able to say that perhaps part of the immediacy of some images is that their symbolism/imagery is taken as 'fact' in our world...But...how much longer does it take to decode words?

jrf on the absence of thought bubbles in A Game of You...?

II. Some more (not a lot, yet! critical commentary)

Derek Parker Royal "Introduction: Coloring America; Multi-Ethnic Engagement with Graphic Narrative." MELUS 32, 3 (Fall 2007): 7-22.

visual language: more immediate processing time and more
"efficient exchange between author(s) and audience
heavily coded medium, rely on stereotyping
broader, more abstract a figure: closer we come to identifying with it
time is spacialized in graphic narrative
comics' spatio-topical system foregrounds relational perspective:
word balloons, frame of individual panels, gutter ("blank" space between panels),
strip (horizontal ban of panel arrangement), page layout
graphic narrative best term to capture most permutations of comics

Annalisa Castaldo "No More Yielding than a Dream," College Literature 31, 4 (Fall 2004): 94-100.
equal weight to text and images, providing both immediate effect and intellectual engagement
because drawn:  illustrate the fantastic and unreal more effectively
leads to persistent metatextuality, as characters regularly cross over into other universes
continuing series, which allows for slow unfolding of ideas
"For Gaiman, dreams (both sleeping dreams and waking wishes) are both the shadow and seed of reality."

Richard Walsh, "The Narrative Imagination Across Media." Modern Fictions Studies 52, 4 (2006): 855-868.
Narrative cannot be medium-independent: it is always dependent on representation in some medium.
dreaming is a "first draft of thought"..."the dream can't revise"...is a sequential, recursive process...
can be understood as ... the proto-fiction

or as the proto-reality?
consider the nice contrast between Molly's remembering
& jrlewis's thinking about dreaming and revised "axis of reality"

esp. apt here (re my questions about how to write about texts that question the validity of writing)
is Shayna's continuing supply of Scott McCloud,
commenting on The Form of a Webcomic --
in the form of a webcomic!
(might this invite some of you to re-think yoru resistance to theory??)

"Shouldn't stories dictate the shape our comics take, and not the other way around?
...a new form of sequential art...that recaptures comics' pre-print ancestor..."
 

thinking about graphic narratives as contemporary forms of medieval illuminated manuscripts??

III. exploring also the non-graphic geneology of Gaiman's graphic novel
opening w/ Alice in Wonderland
cf. Samuel Delany's Preface: "not the Game of I...."