Craig's Relationships...

Craig's relationships are all very different. Up to page 224 his relationship with Raina can be summed up on page 172. Not a word is said in this panel, but you can feel the mutual love, trust and comfort between the two.
His relationship with his parents are a bit more complex. It seems on page 157 that he and his parents are at least comfortable with each other. They occupy the same room without confrontation. Up to this point I wasn't terribly clear about that. His father appears to be little more than an authority figure, where there seems to be more dialogue with his mother.
His relationship with God isn't clear for me. He makes it a point to read his bible every night, but seems to be uncomfortable every time he thinks about his faith.

Blankets Close Read...

Reading Craig Thompson's "Blankets" I was visually struck by two panels in particular. The first was on page 32. I would call it a "Splash Page". The picture takes up the whole page but holds multiple ideas; the incidents with the babysitter, the tension between Craig and the teacher, the tension between Craig and his fellow students, Craig's shame about the memory as well as his shame in school, and the bell ringing the end of class. It is a particularly painful page with all of its heavy subjects, but impressive in that it can fit so much meaning together. The black around his "thought bubble" sets a depressed tone for the memory and separates it from the buzz of what is going on around him.
The most interesting panel for me is another full page picture on page 158. The story progresses through where he meets Raina, goes to church camp, visits more memories, struggles with his faith, school, and authority figures until your head is swirling with all of these troubles and events and then this panel lands in front of you and everything stops while you take in this heavy piece of information; Raina's parents are getting a divorce. There are times in life that that really happens, time sort of seems to stand still. Craig Thompson effectively illustrates that moment in this story. The empty space around Raina helps clear your mind of all the distractions and focus on the "stunned" feeling one gets with such news.

A particularly poignant sentence that caught my eye from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson is on page 132 when she says "I lay for a long time watching the oranges. They were pretty, but not much help. I was going to need more than an icon to get me through this one." For some reason that sentence struck me instantly. I couldn't help but wonder if she wasn't talking about oranges at all at that point, but rather Jesus Christ and the fact that He is the icon for her faith and religious beliefs. She seemed to be saying that she used to lay all her faith in His taking care of the situation, but that it was different this time; that she was going to have to handle things differently, that she was seeing things differently. My suspicions seemed to be confirmed as she slowly comes away from her church through the rest of the book. I don't really have much more to say about it, just that it was particulary jarring for me. I don't usually take to reading into words too much, and symbology interpretation isn't my strong point, so it was odd that it stuck out like it did.

Responding to Peggy

I'm going to have to admit that I'm having trouble with most of these statements. It's not that I can't open my mind to how other races might have trouble with these issues, because certainly there are these troubles, but just as many white people have troubles like these. I think that this goes beyond white people, or black people. Even hispanics are having an easier time of finding themselves in the media; Dora the Explorer and Diego are mainstream children's shows. What if we extended it to gender? Even then, I have a hard time because I don't see too much in the way of sexism. I can disagree with quite a few of them when I look at it from a class standpoint. A lot of these could be hard for a person with less money.

Gender, race and class figure into every part of every day life. We like to think that we are not biased towards races or genders or how much money someone makes, but every time we look at someone we subconsiously, and automatically appraise them, at least to the extent of "this person is male, or this person is female", and "this person is *enter ethnicity*, or what ethnicity is this person?". We then attach our stereotypes and preferences before anything is ever said by that person. Often our opinions change after we have gotten to know that person, but as humans, we have to have a place to start.
Discussing these issues help us to identify our biases and evaluate them. We can decide if there is something we need to learn more about or confront. Sometimes the bias is against us, and we can extend our views to other people who might not understand where we are coming from.
I tend to read everything at least once without letting outside influences into what I'm reading. Inevitably, however, one or more of these issues will creep into my mind. I think about whether it is a male or female writing the piece, what sort of background they might have...

Multimodal McCloud...

Here's another attempt at getting this blog posted now that I'm back in the states! (As if I don't have enough trouble trying to figure this blogging thing out in my OWN country!)

Greetings from Grand Cayman!

“Multimodal” simply means to have more than one mode. In context, “multimodal” refers to the many different ways in which our society is communicating. I absolutely encounter multimodal communication in my everyday life. I am raising two small boys right now, and the perfect example arose the other day when I was teaching the word “soft”. I was referring to our cat, and so I used long, broad strokes as I pet the cat, and changed my voice to a “soft” quality as I repeated the word soft over and over as I helped the boys feel what I meant by having them pet the cat. Likewise right here on the cruise ship most of the crew is from different countries all over the world, and in foreign ports we all use hand gestures, common words, and vocal expression to communicate with each other.

Is McCloud’s text multimodal? That’s kind of hard for me to answer definitively. Certainly it is linguistic, visual, and spatial. Is it actually gestural or audio though? I can argue either way. Really it is only ink on paper, and not making actual gestures or sounds. But it conveys gestures and sounds in a way that our brains process them as if we really were hearing or seeing them, and if we are experiencing the gestures and sounds in the same way, isn’t it about the same?

An Almost Comical Understanding...

I've never really read much past the Sunday comics in the newspaper... I think I can honestly say that I've never opened a TRUE comic book. I've always thought them to be simple ideas, nothing with very deep plots, nothing I could really relate to, I mean, after all, I can't fly, sling webs, or create laser beam or storms from my eyes. So I guess to be completely honest, I kind of looked down on them and saw them as kind of geeky and childish. Reading McCloud's book has changed my thoughts on comics... I mean the very fact that an informative book was written/drawn in comic book fashion shows me that complex ideas CAN come from such pages. Likewise, we can take complex or serious thoughts, and with this medium add a bit of humor to what could otherwise be kind of dry. For example on page 5 in the lower right corner, he simply says "But to DEFINE comics, we must first do a little AESTHETIC SURGERY and separate form from content!" What makes the statement hilarious is that he is holding a double bladed ax. :)