Sara Miner Literature of Comics

The comic that I focused on reading during class is the Garfield strip. I found it interesting that the strip originally had more characters than just Jon, Garfield and the occasional appearance from Odie. It felt like the humor used to be much more based around cynical jokes about Jon, but as the comic progressed and time passed by the jokes became centered around Garfield and the humor became much less dry. The jokes seem very fueled by the words rather than mostly on visuals, since there are full speech bubbles on most of the panels.

Something that McCloud talked about in "Understanding Comics" that stood out to me as intriguing was when he was explaining how our brains look at something and only remember a simplified version of that thing and fills in the informational gap with what is familiar to us. I had never thought before about why cartoony drawings of things are more appealing to us than the familiarity of a realistically rendered thing, but it's pretty cool to think that it's because I've never had to think about why things are drawn the way they are before.

     Through the use of emotion invoking visual cues like facial expression, icons and the exaggeration of value, Shaun Tan's novel "The Arrival" successfully portrays the story of immigration. As humans growing up we learn certain emotions and how they are shown through facial expressions, so we are able to understand and sympathize with what emotions we are seeing in the imagery of the novel. If not for the emotion of the characters being portrayed so clearly, the reader would not be able to understand the thoughts of the characters or be able to feel how they feel. Like through every day conversation, if someone is sad your face and emotions will reflect their sadness naturally.       Through learned behavior, the reader can infer the emotions of situations based off of the emotions and body language the characters are showing. The use of value in the illustrations helps to create a stronger sense of emotion within scenes. It helps to transition you from panel to pa