I can probably credit the Sunday comics in the Chicago tribune as my first introduction to art. I was obsessed with them. Every Sunday when I went to my grandparents' house, my grandma would hand me the comic pages that she saved from the week and I would read through them, cutting out my favorites. By the age of 10, I had libraries of scrapbooks and folders with my favorite comic strips. These included: Zits, Peanuts, Sherman's Lagoon, Mutts, For Better or for Worse, Baby Blues, and Calvin and Hobbes, amongst many others.
When I was reading Krazy Kat, I realized how similar it was to the Mutts comic that I had grown up loving.
Krazy Kat
Mutts
The simplistic character designs were what originally tipped me off, as I have always loved Patrick McDonnell's designs for Mooch and Earl, but I never realized how similar it was to Krazy Kat. Both comics feature a pair of unlikely friends (Cat & Mouse vs Cat & Dog) and just simple little gimmics that happen between them. I think that is what draws me to comic strips. They're generally very simple and a very quick read, and I love the very simplistic ones where it's just a small, funny action happening. As I was reading through the Krazy Kat comics, I read one that reminded me of a comic I've seen before; sure enough, I think Patrick McDonnell was doing a shout out!
The Krazy Kat comic
The Mutt's Shoutout
The eomic strips I tend to enjoy most are the ones that deal with everyday situations. Even Nemo in Slumberland is a great example, because the audience can completely relate to having a crazy dream and falling out of bed as of a result of something happening in the dream. Or, at least, I totally can. I believe the success of a lot of these comics are relateability; we love comics like Krazy Kat and Mutts for their simplicity, the same way we love the characters of Peanuts. With Peanuts, Schulz generally takes a common situation and puts a crazy personality one of one the kids within it, paired with funny visual gags. I enjoy that comic strips are just snippets of conversation that we get to see, when really there is so much more going on that the author hasn't let up on. For example, it wasn't until this class that I realized McDonnell was doing a shout out to a previous comic strip; I always just thought it was a cute little remark.
Because comic strips work on a shorter panel basis, they are more simplified, succinct stories and are often just a snippet of what could really be happening in the comic world.
I have never read Understanding Comics before, but I have heard a lot about it from my roommate who read it a ton as a kid. There was on topic in there that I really found interesting as soon as I read it, and I wanted to elaborate more on it.
Scott McCloud talked about our mental image of ourselves and our abilities to relate to cartoons so well (p. 31-36); when we think of ourselves, we only have a vague idea of how our own face is looking like, a simplified idea. Therefore, when we see really realistic depictions of faces, we see it as someone else, but simplified cartoons we see as ourselves. I also believe that we project thoughts, feelings, and emotions onto simplified characters, depending on the context of where they're presented combined with our own thoughts and feelings. This is why animated movies have a way of really touching audience's hearts in a way that live action sometimes can't. This might be because I'm super enthusiastic about animation in general, but when an animated film such as Frozen becomes the 5th highest grossing film ever (reaching around $1.219 billion in the box office), you realize there has to be more to it. The reasoning can be that both children and adults alike can look at overly simplified characters and see themselves within them. Because this is true with comics, I believe this is only intensified in animation, since now we have motion to go off of.
The first example that popped into my mind when I read about this is a character from the most recent Disney film, Big Hero 6.
Baymax is a robot, and he doesn't have a mouth or eyebrows, just two black dots for eyes. He has a voice, but it doesn't have much inflection within it-- so technically, we shouldn't be able to get any emotive clues from him other than some slight variances in his posture. Yet, throughout the film, you're able to feel how Baymax is feeling.
Here, Baymax is "happy", which we read from the half circles of his eyes. This fortifies the idea of Scott McCloud's icon; two half circles are read here as happy eyes, simply because humans are just always looking to put a face on things. You even image that line across his face as a little smile. The scene I feel Baymax is the most powerful (Spoiler if you haven't seen the film) is where Baymax and Hiro have to be separated.
Spoiler to anyone who hasn't seen the film, don't watch the clip below!
I personally love this scene, and I cried both times I saw it in the theater (and, if I'm going to be honest, I teared up rewatching the clip). I read a quote once (but unfortunately couldn't find it to link it... if I do, i'll post it), but the creaters of Baymax talked about how since his design was so simple, the audience projected whatever feeling and emotion he needed on him; he ended up becoming whatever the audience needed him to be. It's such a beautiful thing with how simplified Baymax is; there's a couple of shots in the scene above where I'm not even sure if anything is animated on Baymax, yet they're so emotional. We feel Baymax's sacrifice, yet he doesn't even blink in these moments, thus supporting Scott McCloud's point. Scott McCloud says, "If who I am matters less, then maybe what I say will matter more." Since most of the target audience is for kids, this works well in their favor in reinforcing good morals, which is what the earliest cartoons aimed to do.
Another example in which we are able to do something like this is with the movie Wall-E.
Reading the script for this movie is pretty funny, considering that the only words these characters speak for most of the film is "Wall-E" and "Eva". But even though they don't have most characteristics of faces, we project their movements to mean things -- the tilt of their eyes, the way their eyes are focused, etc.
Another example of CG that fortifies this point is the term uncanny valley. This is when a CG character looks too realistic, thus giving the audience a creepy feeling. Good examples of these are Tintin and Polar Express. Though the characters look realistic, the effect is creepy; in the animation world, we understand tend to caricature moreso because you will never achieve perfect movement or design with realistic looking figures. Simply, humans know how humans look like too much. That is why we're more willing to believe how an animated character is feeling moreso than a weird hybrid. Simplified characters are easy to create believable motion with, and as Tabia stated in class, give you more room to stray away from strict human rules.
I'll wrap this post up since I could probably go on for ages about it, but I thought it was super interesting to read a bit more of the reasoning behind a lot of my favorite comics (Peanuts, Mutts, Calvin and Hobbes, Zits) are pretty caricatured, thus causing the viewer (like me) to be able to relate to it better.
1. The woman has just won the battle over the man, winning the basket of eggs. She is showing his power to the chicken, letting him know who is the new master.
2. A father comes to watch over his dying daughter, forced there by the chicken master.
3. The rooster people put to death the previous maiden as the next one undresses to become their slave.
4. The rooster people discover that another one of the women they have laying around is sick and also needs to be put into the earth.
5. The roosters have killed the women, causing the chicken people extreme joy.
6. The man leaves his wife, as the rooster king is watching over him. He's trying to shield his wife from harm?
7. The women go to the rooster man upset, wondering how and when they're husbands will come back from war
8. The women hide from the rooster man, who senses they are there because she dropped her candle in haste.
9. The men have come home and found that their wives are skeletons, while the rooster king watches on.
10. The roostermen are stealing away the women, shoving them onto a train or taking them back to their camp.
11. One of the women mourns over her husband who has been turned into a roosterman as the other roosterman prepare to kill them both.
12. Ever ruthless, the rooster king commands that the men whip the woman for the wrongdoing's she's committed.
13. The rooster now has overtaken the woman, causing a war between her and the other women.
14. They hang the woman as an example for all the other woman for what it means if you disobey the rooster king.
I had never read Shaun Tan's "The Arrival" before today, but I ended up loving the story and found myself surprised at how easily I understood what was happening and how fluid it felt.
In Computer Animation, we talk a lot about the structure of stories and how to stage a story properly so that it reads in a clear, visual way to the viewer. I found that many of the techniques that we use when storyboarding a short film were also evident in this comic. For example, Shaun Tan used a variety of shot choices; he showed close up's of the characters so we could read their expressions, but also included long spreads and full illustrations so we could see where they were. I felt this helped ground the story, because you knew where everything was happening, and also gave it a sense of scale. This was also especially helpful to keep the viewer interested, as there was a variety of things to look at. Additionally, many compositions were from the point of view of the main character. Because of this, we were able to see where the character was looking and experience how he was seeing the world. Since this was a completely new world, I felt that this technique was crucial in illustrating the grandeur feeling of this new society, as well as show you the main character's confusion from not being able to understand any of it. An aspect of this comic that I really loved was the element of repetition and the way Shaun Tan structured some images to feel like glimpses of memories. This was especially helpful for the scenes where the main character was looking for a job and also when he first arrived to the new land. Through these little glimpses, you understood what the process felt like rather than having to see every single step of it. For some parts however, such as the factory scene, it was better to have all of the panels showing the sorting of the figurines because it let the viewer feel how mundane the job was. Shaun Tan also did a great job at illustrating the characters' faces. As humans, we understand what's happening with one another through our expressions. One of Shaun Tan's strengths in this narrative is his ability to emote his characters so realistically, giving them every slight nuance to let you know what they're truly thinking. You could tell exactly how a character was feeling so you were able to connect with the story; your mind was able to fill in the gaps when the story didn't explicitly show you what was happening.
I felt that this story was very powerful in the fact that it not only showed you what happened with the character, but it also didn't show you everything, giving the viewer room to invent. One of the best parts in the story was when it showed the transition through the seasons, all through illustrations of the flower. This story is a great example of how you can so clearly illustrate what's happening without words and I really enjoyed it!
