Reading and Writing About Comics ala McCloud Part Deux

I examined Rebecca's blog post at this location. It described a comic by David Gaddis in which he depicts a man's flirtatious encounter with a woman in a jazzy coffee house. The comic bears no text but tells the story with large panoramic shots of the interior and closeups from the man's point of view. Rebecca calls attention to the difference in coloring, mentioning that when the man is alone, "drab, muted colors are used. When he interacts with a woman the colors are more red and more alive with warmth." The perspectives and frames are also used to give a sense of communication between the two, and she notes that the shape of the panels becomes more inconsistent when the man is alone.

The artistic style of the comic reminded me of other art that I've seen in the past in some English comics and the whole feel of it gave me a pseudo-realistic feeling. One of the panels, in which the woman looks up in horror to meet the man's gaze, it shows his face from her perspective, horribly distorted in a fisheye-type lense. As McCloud describes it, "Expressionism, as it came to be called, didn't start as a scientific art, but rather as an honest expression of the internal turmoil these artist just could not repress" (122). The lines in Gaddis' comic are free-flowing and jazzy, full of warm energy while the characters interact with mixed emotions that play out in their facial expressions and the environment around them. McCloud writes that all lines can carry some expressionistic potential, and even "the most bland 'expressionless' line on earth can't help but characterize their subject in some way" (125).