Author: Caroline

In the final version of my literary narrative, I wrote a new beginning and ending, and added a few details throughout my narrative. The process of drawing the comics made me realize the importance of details, be it examples that support my argument or descriptions of a particular emotion or realization, since they are the key factors to make a story interesting and convincing. Therefore, I added more details about the content of the dairies and stories I mentioned in my essay, hoping that they would make my narration to be more comprehensible and relatable.

However, the changes I made to the beginning and the ending of my final narrative are drastically different from the ones I had in the comics, as I felt that the same narrative would be less ineffective if it was presented through text instead of visuals, especially colors. For me, the visual medium allows me to establish a certain ambiance and incorporate cues more implicitly and effortlessly, while in a text narrative, I might have to spend a lengthy paragraph to achieve the same effect. However, the combination of text and self-created visuals was to me indeed the most powerful presentation of my idea. The visuals give me the opportunity to influence the amount of time readers spent on each part, thus allowing me to highlight certain parts of the story.

Overall, I enjoyed completing this assignment and was able to practice and reflect on what we’ve discussed over the class through the process. The first step, which was drawing the storyboard, was the most challenging yet most interesting part for me. The process of turning an essay into comics made me think about ways to change it into a more concise narrative since the ultimate goal was to effectively recount the story in the least number of pages possible. Therefore, I re-arranged some parts of the story in order to have more pages for the ending part where I could slow down, leaving the readers something to think about. It was through completing this assignment that I began to realize that the smoother the comic reads, the more time and energy the author has used to conceive the storyboard, but readers could easily underestimate the difficulty of creating a seamless narrative. In addition, compared to the essay, I tried to add some humor and interesting details in my comics as I realized that the readers could easily lose interest in pure accounts of personal experience.

As for drawing, I used procreate since it allowed me to easily make changes and add text and color. Initially, I was planning to draw a black and white comics, but later found that color would be particularly helpful to signal transitions and create a certain ambiance. For instance, in my comics, the first and last few pages were colored in pale blue while the others were in brown, thus encouraging the readers to notice the relationship between different parts and pay attention to how they are indicative of the protagonists’ personal growth.

One thing that I wish to improve on is the layout of the page. While uploading the pages onto my website, I noticed that the layout for the first few pages is really compact, while other pages are more spaced, which might disrupt the reading. Also, I wish to come up with ways to include fewer texts by coming up with more informative visuals in my future projects.

The process of tracing and annotating allows me to dive into the images and recognize the details that got ignored when I was reading the comics at a normal pace. For instance, it allows me to realize the effort Bechdel put into depicting all the details of surroundings in her room: the clothes in the closet, the curtain beside the desk, or even the labels on the cupboard boxes, all of which contribute to enhance a sense of realism. The details also reflect lots of unobvious contrasts: like the different dressing styles of mother and daughter which are reflective of their diverging personalities. For Stitches, it made me notice that the author employed different shades of grey intentionally to emphasize his feelings of depression through the use of shadows on certain areas. Through shadows, he’s actually creating different lighting effects that help to establish the atmosphere.

Initially, I was struggling to organize my ideas into an ABT structure because all the patterns I was planning to analyze point to one general conclusion, so it may easily become an essay with three parallel body paragraphs. So I spent some time reorganizing my thoughts, trying to find if there exists a progressive argument that allows me to gradually dive deeper into my analysis instead of presenting a general rule in the opening paragraph and using all the other paragraphs to prove it. Eventually, I decided to have two body paragraphs, one on visuals and the other on texts, but I will save my concluding remarks to the end which enables me to gradually unfold my arguments.

The title of my essay is “the hidden storyteller”, which resonates well with the focus of the course “secret language of comics.” The process of slowing down and reading one page for several times significantly enhanced my understanding of the comics, and it was during the process of writing about them and comparing the two comics that I was able to notice the patterns I ignored. For instance, after I decided to focus on the representation of emotions in both comics, I began to notice the various ways employed by the two authors that are reflective of how they dealt with emotions. Especially for Fun Home, it was through comparing it with Stitches that I realized how emotionally detached it is. It feels like a documentary of the past, and the narrator is trying to explain it, interpret it, and reflect on it by analyzing herself. On the other hand, Stitches is sentimental, passionate, the emotions are powerful.