The group comic project that I was involved with was about the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The other three people in my group were Mike Green, Adam Lebovic, and Chris Kontoghiorghes. Each of us contributed in a different way towards our comic as a whole. I believe that I played the creative part in our group. Besides for completing panels 14-19, I also helped make the comic more emotional. What this means is I was able to put certain comical techniques such as close-ups and facial expressions into our comic. Throughout this project I realized that comics are not just about creating pictures with words. What makes the comic great are the little things such as hand gestures and facial expressions. I wanted to incorporate these things into our comic about google.

My favorite comic project besides my own groups was the one titled “10,000 Hours.” This group consisted of David Kim, Manasvini Mehta, Brittany Nguyen, Josh Werman, and Nikki Ciesinski. I found this project particularly interesting because I have read the book before. It was one of the most interesting books I have read, and the group did a great job at transforming it into comic form. I like how they drew out the panels, which is something that no other group did.

This final group project really relates to the rest of the semester’s projects because the class was focused on graphic novels. While doing this project I learned that working in a group is the best way to get the most ideas into a project. Each member of my group brought up a new idea that was put into the comic panels. It was a great last project because it took something we learned from all of the other projects and brought them together. We looked at a novel from a different view for each project, and then this last project utilized all of these ideas. I really enjoyed this project and it was my favorite one of the semester.

Link: http://davidmorgen.org/comic1/comic-final-project/

As my group and I worked alongside each other to finish this project, my main role as contributor was to make sure everyone’s finalized pages flowed well together. Because we decided to each take an equal part in drawing this comic, there was a concern that the plot line would become too ragged. Regardless of our different drawing styles, we decided to draw the characters as simple cats and pasting the same image for each example, so that the whole comic would be more cohesive. My biggest contribution to this group project was coordination and organization. After everyone sent me their individual pages, I made sure the right images were pasted on certain panels, and the timeline made sense. Also, I served as a vocal backboard, bouncing off ideas and organizing them in our Google Doc. I chose the last page of the comic as the featured image because it represents how all the different styles, dialogues, and examples are tied together. The most difficult part as the central organizer was dually making sure the entire piece was smoothly transitioning and creating a conclusion that was simple, entertaining, and to the point.

“The OverProtected Kid” was created with the intent to make an impact with its colors. Attention to font, colors, and the juxtaposition of the panels was not unnoticed. To make it more relevant, the group used real images as a base for their comic. Instead of a hand-written comic, this style of approach elevates the seriousness of the argument made. The different types of font used were also parallel to the different significances of each panel. The next-to-last panel was almost completely colored, but the “reality” side was more vivid, implicating its contrast. I learned the importance of details, and they make a big impact when handled efficiently.

As a final project, I had to simultaneously do a close reading and distant reading, which is similar to the “Maus” and “Mapping Fun Home” projects. For Maus, tracing the individual panels helped me understand the details of a comic’s impact. After analyzing the general trends of Fun Home, I also understood the importance of overlaying themes and how the story flows, and I translated that experience into this project because our comic had multiple pages, and those pages had individual scenarios: it was essential for all the panels to flow effortlessly. My most recent project, Vietnamerica, digested the entire comic as a whole. In other words, writing an essay about the graphic novel presented a valid argument in text alone and helped me understand how the comic was presented; this learning experience helped my group create a certain approach to creating our comic.

Link: The Safety Delusion

My main role in the project was to do the logistical work of creating the comic in Comic Life 3. I have worked with a variety of creative software, such as the GIMP, so I felt that I was well-suited to figuring out the workings of Comic Life 3. I also played an integral role in drafting the storyline of the comic. It was my idea to gradually flesh out a panel-by-panel draft of our comic in GoogleDocs. Once we had a concrete plan laid out, we cooperatively searched the internet for Creative Commons licensed photos that matched our draft. Additionally, I came up with the ideas to incorporate a reality vs. expectations segment, and the sci-fi esque “danger free” world. These two elements made critical points central to the argument of the article. These elements also both make claims in a stylish, artistic form. I consider myself an artsy person with a penchant for aesthetics, a skill that proved useful for our project.

The Almighty Google made use of bitstrips. I thought this was interesting because it resulted in the comic strip being uniform in style with a consistent set of characters, something our comic seriously lacked. Admittedly, this makes the comic more aesthetically appealing and easier to follow. Obviously using a fixed set of visual elements, however, has limitations. However, this group effectively overcame those limitations through photo editing and creative use of the tools provided by bistrips.

I learned a lot about the interplay between visual elements and text from making this comic. At first, when the first few pages lacked text, a friend pointed out to me that the story made little sense. Looking back at it, I realized she was right. After adding the text, I realized that together, the text and the visuals were able to clearly convey an argument while having a certain aesthetic appeal that text alone lacks. This project combined skills we developed from all of the other assignments. We had to engage in a close-reading of the article to pick up on the nuances of the argument, a skill we learned from the Maus assignment. We had to visually represent an argument about a text, as we did with Fun Home. Finally, we analyzed and explained an argument made by a text using specific references from the text, as we required to do in the Vietnamerica assignment.

Vietnamerica is a bildungsroman because it explores the relationships and pasts of the characters. The past and present are juxtaposed and compared to create a unified vision. For example, the narrator himself experiences growth throughout the chapters. As he learns about his parents’ past, those realizations make him mature. His parents also come to terms about their past fled lives when they come to Vietnam. The result is a confrontational mingling of past experiences and future expectations.

I believe that Vietnamerica is a bildungsroman because it covers the history of Tran’s family. First it goes over his grandfather’s story and then his own father’s story. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what actions changed Tran because the story is not in chronological order at all. What was interesting to me was how he and sister tried to assimilate into American culture. His sister tried to dress up like Madonna to fit in, and he was constantly bullied in school while trying to find his own identity. Being caught in the middle of this identity crisis of trying to figure out where he fits in, whether its Saigon or America, impacts Tran in a plethora of different ways both good and bad.

Is Allison really inexpressive? Fun Home is a personal story, yet so far we’ve seem to have taken Alison’s word as gospel.  If it’s written it happened.  Her father hit them, he was endlessly obsessed with the house, but it is important to realize that this is a memoir, and that we can never really trust the narrator.  After all, Allison does have a history of not betraying her emotion (p.44)… or at least she says she does.

It must also be noted that everyone does wrestle with grief differently.  Allison portrays herself as calm and unemotional after her father dies, but his death is clearly something she has spent her entire life contemplating, as evinced by the  entire existence and plot of the comic itself.  While she acted unemotional (or, again, said she did) that does not suggest that the death did not affect her.

Panel 1 -before annotation       Panel 2 -before annotation

Panel 1 -after annotation          Panel 2 -after annotation

Reading the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman really hit me in ways that I never thought about before. This is because I am Jewish, and this is a book about the Holocaust. It brought to my attention different aspects about the horrible time period. The fascinating thing to me was that I was able to have these realizations solely from the panels that the novel consists of. Upon reading Maus, two specific pages of panels caught my attention. The first panel that caught my attention was on page 113 of the first book. There is a significant backstory behind this panel. As many people know, the Jews were persecuted during the Holocaust and in order to be rescued some were hidden inside houses. These houses needed to have secret rooms that were out of sight when the Nazi’s came around in search parties. In this page the Jews are hiding in the attic of a house and person that looks like a mouse finds them. This is important because in this novel the Jews are depicted as mice. Since it is a mouse, one would expect the mouse to just see them and look the other way as if they saw nothing. In the first panel the mouse has an exclamation point in the speech bubble. This stuck out to me because it is bolded and clearly the state of emphasis. Upon looking at these panels I realized that Art used different techniques of shading and drawing to emphasize certain ideas. For example, in book 2 on page 82 there is a panel regarding a dog. In order to make the dog the center of focus he shades it in much darker than everything else in the box. This allows to viewer to look more at the dog then the rest of the things in the box. Another thing that I noticed while looking at the different panels are the different emotions of the characters. Normally it would be very difficult to show an emotion in a graphic novel because all of the panels consist of pictures with very few words. That is why it is called a graphic novel. In this panel of book one on page 113 the emotion of the mouse is emphasized solely because there is a crevice in his head that is drawn. Drawing these little lines may seem insignificant, but it is this little line that shows the emotion of nervousness for the entire panel. It is pretty amazing what a little line can do to a picture. Art also uses two panels’ similarly to create a theme as well. This is represented in book 2 where there is a story told about a dog that got shot because it was disturbing people. There are two boxes that are identical, one with a dog and one with a mouse to emphasize that the person was treated in the same way that a rabid dog was treated. This is very important because it is once again a great technique to let the reader really feel remorseful over the death of the person. The Nazi’s treated the Jewish people just like a rabid, crazy dog would be treated and words weren’t even needed to show this.

One of the most important parts of tracing the panels was noticing the difference between the large and small boxes. I noticed that the larger boxes were usually much more important and had a lot more meaning to them than the smaller ones. On both panels that I traced, there were panels much larger than others. An example of this was in book one where there was a large panel depicting the Jewish people getting discovered by the Nazis because the man who they let go betrayed them and was an informant. Another example of this was on page 82 of book two. The image of the Jewish people walking past the dead body is one of the most moving and emotional panels in the book, and that is why it is so large.

Upon tracing the different panels I found myself leaving out certain things. These included certain shadings and markings. I decided to leave these out because I felt that they were unimportant and didn’t depict what the author was really trying to emphasize in that specific panel. Maus could not have been anything but a graphic novel because the author was really able to capture the little details of importance in the story by shading in certain things and changing panel sizes to depict the importance of moments.