English

Methods of characterization in _____________

Literary allusions in _____________

Point of view in ________________

Setting in ______________

The importance of minor characters in ______

Irony in _____________

Foreshadowing in ______________

Themes in _____________

The portrayal of women in _________

What really caused the Spill?

Lexa’s childhood trauma

The creepy doll motif

Wiley’s role in Spill Zone (or any other supporting character’s role)

The role of the meat puppets

The importance of the playground in Spill Zone

The significance of photography in Spill Zone

Middle men (or women) in Spill Zone

Ritual in Spill Zone

Monsters in Spill Zone

International politics in Spill Zone

The class system in Persepolis

Gender politics in Persepolis

War and childhood trauma

The importance of family in Persepolis

Heroism in Persepolis

The role of Marjane’s imagination

The role of religion in Persepolis

Education in Persepolis

Elements of steampunk in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Gender politics in League

Race/class divisions in League

Alternate history in League

Pornographic elements in League

The narrative voice in League

The role of conscience in League

Possible illustration analysis topics:

For each suggestion, fill in the blank with one of the following: Scott Westerfeld and Alex Puvilland’s Spill Zone, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s Monstress, Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido’s Blacksad, Minna Sundberg’s Stand Still, Stay Silent. [Note: when writing about the illustrations, you need to include the names of both the author and the illustrator.] You do not have to use one of these suggested topics. You can adapt one of these if you like or come up with your own. The only requirement is that you write about one or more of the graphic novels we are reading in class (including McCloud). Make sure your topic is narrow enough for a 5-7-page essay.

Timing techniques in _________

Panel transitions in __________

Visual iconography in ___________

Closure in __________

Imagery in ___________

The effects of color in __________

Film techniques in ____________

The masking effect in __________

Synaesthetic techniques in __________

Line quality in ______________

Visual symbols in ______________

The use of word balloons in ____________

Portraying emotions in ________________

Interaction of words and pictures in _________

Visual methods of characterization in _________

If you choose to analyze illustrations, you will be applying concepts from McCloud’s book to one of the other books we read, so your Works Cited page will have two entries. Here’s an example:

White 6

Works Cited

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Lettering by Bob Lappan, HarperPerennial, 1994, mm12.johncaserta.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Understanding%20Comics%20 (The%20Invisible%20Art)%20By%20Scott%20McCloud.pdf.

Moon, Fábio, and Gabriel Bá. Daytripper. Coloring by Dave Stewart, lettering by Sean Konot, DC, 2011.

STEP TWO: ASK A QUESTION

Once you have a topic that is narrow enough for a 5-7 page paper, ask a direct question about it.

· What does the setting contribute to Persepolis?

· How does Alan Moore deal with the sexual politics of the late Victorian Age?

· Why is Addison continually drawn back to the playground in Spill Zone?

· How do Kevin O’Neill’s illustrations create a steampunk atmosphere in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?

· What does color contribute to Spill Zone?

· How does Alan Moore incorporate Nietzsche’s ideas in Watchmen?

STEP THREE: RE-READ THE NOVEL OR NOVELS

Now re-read the graphic novel closely, looking for anything related to your topic, specifically for information that helps you answer your research question. If your topic involves comparing aspects of two different graphic novels, look through both of them carefully for evidence that answers your question. Take notes as you read, including the chapter/page number or any other specific info that will help you find the information again.

STEP FOUR: CONSTRUCT A THESIS STATEMENT

Examine the evidence you gathered from re-reading the novel. Based on whatever you discover in the novel, answer the question you asked in step two. The answer to the question will be your thesis statement. (Don’t use the question itself as your thesis.)

Sample thesis: In Watchmen, Alan Moore presents Adrian Veidt and Jon Osterman as two possible examples of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, then pits them against each other to show who is the real Superman.

STEP FIVE: WRITE A SCRATCH OUTLINE

A scratch outline consists of your thesis statement and a short (approximately half a page), informal list of your main points and their supporting evidence.

Sample scratch outline:

Thesis: In Watchmen, Alan Moore presents Adrian Veidt and Jon Osterman as two possible examples of Nietzche’s Übermensch, then pits them against each other to show who is the real Superman.

1. establish use of Nietzsche in book

· epigram from Nietzche

· references to Nietzche

· use of Nietzche’s ideas

2. Adrian as Nietzche’s superman

· birth and background

· Will to Power

· special abilities

· quest for meaning in life

3. Jon as the superman

· birth and background

· Will to Power

· special abilities

· succumbing to nihilism in order to overcome it

4. encounter between the two supermen

STEP SIX: WRITE THE ROUGH DRAFT

Using the scratch outline as a guide, write the first draft of your paper quickly. All you need to do with this version is get your ideas down on paper in sentence and paragraph form. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar or whether you have the right page numbers for quotations.

STEP SEVEN: REVISE, THEN EDIT THE PAPER

Revision looks at the big picture: Do your main points support the thesis? Is there clear, compelling evidence to back up each main point? Do you use lots of extremely specific evidence and not just broad statements? Would a different order of presentation work better? Do you need to delete, change, or add any sentences and paragraphs? Does your argument make sense? Do your sentences make sense? Are there clear transitions between ideas? Is the evidence presented clearly? Have you made quotations a grammatical part of your own sentences?

Editing looks at spelling and grammar and the nitpicky parts of format. Make sure you have followed MLA format correctly, down to every space. Check all spelling (but don’t rely on spellcheck, which will lead you astray). Check all grammar (but don’t rely on grammarcheck because it’s almost always wrong). Look for typos and missing words, incomplete corrections made during revision, and partial sentences.

STEP EIGHT: PREPARE THE FINAL DRAFT

After you have fixed everything, save your final draft. Before you turn it in for a grade, have someone else do a final proofreading of it, looking for any small errors you missed.

LITERARY WORKS: PATTERNS FOR A THESIS

The thesis evaluates aspects of a literary work. The following examples are representative of many possible evaluations, but keep in mind that these are only a few of the possible thesis patterns. Also keep in mind that these theses are for literary analysis; you will need to adapt them if you are analyzing illustrations.

1. In (title of work), (author) uses/shows/illustrates (one aspect)

Example: In “Barn Burning," William Faulkner shows the characters Sadie and Abner Snopes struggling for their identity.

2. In (title of work), (author) uses (one aspect) to define/ strengthen/illustrate the (element of the work).

Example: In “Youth,” Joseph Conrad uses foreshadowing to strengthen the plot.

3. In (title of work), (author) uses (an important part of work) as a unifying device for (one element), (another element), and (another element). The number of elements can vary from one to four.

Example: In “Youth,” Joseph Conrad uses the sea as a unifying device for setting, structure, and theme.

4. (Author) develops the character of ___ in (title of work) through what he does, what he says, what other people say to him or say about him.

Example: Eudora Welty develops the character of Phoenix, in “A Worn Path,” through what Phoenix does, what she says, and what other people say to her.

5. In (title of work), (author) uses (literary device) to accomplish/develop/illustrate/strengthen (element of work).

Example: In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Poe uses the symbolism of the stranger, the clock, and the seventh room to develop the theme of death.

6. (Author) shows/develops/illustrates the theme of ___ by/through

(aspect of work) in (play, poem, story).

Example: Flannery O’Connor illustrates the theme of selfishness through the character of the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

7. (Author) develops his character(s) in (title of work) through his use

of language.

Example: John Updike develops his characters in “A&P” through his use of figurative language.

“As Roguishly as Gypsy Waters”:

An Exploration of Panel Usage in Lackadaisy

In a medium as relatively nascent in the eye of critical exploration as graphic novels, analysis faces an issue common to bleeding-edge movements of any kind: the struggle between definition and innovation. Such is the case when examining Tracy Butler’s Lackadaisy through the lens of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. McCloud, in his groundbreaking work, introduced the world to a way of seeing comics that few had even begun articulating, lending the medium much needed credibility. Fast forward from 1994 to 2006, and we find Butler taking advantage of the fledgling world of web 2.0 technologies, publishing Lackadaisy as a strip-by-strip webcomic, compiled into a volume for our perusal. Ten years can make a difference in any field, but doubly so in any medium so young. Because of the auteur nature of webcomics, Lackadaisy features experimental panel conventions that would have been nearly unheard of when Understanding Comics was written. There is a logical leap from comics to graphic novels, and yet another between graphic novels and webcomics. Time and again, Butler innovates on panel usage in ways McCloud never even hints at. Nevertheless, McCloud’s insight into the comics world lends us a firm starting point for interpreting what innovations Butler employs. After all, to innovate is to break a rule, brevity of said rule regardless—something the denizens of Lackadaisy certainly know a thing or two about.

One might think that the space between panels would be the last place to look for innovation, yet it is just that which so defines the capacities of what Butler is able to accomplish in her work. McCloud gives us a rundown of the kinds of closure that different panel transitions can afford us, spanning moments, actions, scenes, subjects, aspects, and non-sequiturs (McCloud 70-72). In an extremely American way, by and large Butler emphasizes action-to-action transitions, like those seen on page 53 where Viktor and Pepper save each other from one of the pig farmers. Pepper walks down the alley, opens the door, and looks inside—all actions. We also have some of the more emphasized moments via lack of panels at all, such as the burning truck on page 20; in the midst of burning down the pig farmers’ property, we suddenly see Rocky in a conflagrated vehicle, taking up the whole middle third of the page without any constricting borders. McCloud refers to such a technique as creating a “timeless quality” (102). The lack of border around the truck forces us to pause on it as if it were an oasis in the midst of utter chaos, and the notion of a burning truck being such a respite causes us to laugh. We also see various visual flourishes or banners that hail transitions of scenes, like on pages 28-29 of Lackadaisy. However, irregularly, larger, more ornate flourishes occur, such as on the top of page 34 or a sudden clover in the gutter of page 35. Why do such anomalies exist in the work? It would seem, unlike comic books or even self-contained graphic novels, webcomics create their own motifs and conventions as they go along. With comics and graphic novels, layouts and conventions are decided upon at the beginning and cohesively reinforced before publication, but with webcomics, an artist can go years creating the content for a single volume. This practice is nothing new: most webcomics artists start with little or highly unpolished skill, improving as they go along. Even the renowned XKCD started out on bits of scanned graph paper. Consistency becomes a convenience, conventions giving way to constructive improvement. Rather than see comics evolve between artists and serials, like McCloud catalogues, with Butler and web 2.0 technologies, we get to see comics evolve in a single volume.

Furthermore, there are a couple of gutter elements that seem completely new. For one, various panels are grouped together not by their margins, but by darkened, empty panels behind them. Page 45 provides an excellent example when Pepper meets Freckle at the entrance to Lackadaisy’s above-ground front. Another can be seen on page 11 when Pepper is convincing Viktor not to beat up Rocky. If McCloud’s explanation of a borderless panel conveys a sense of timelessness, might it be possible that Butler employs the opposite—a panel-less border—for a sense of timefulness? The dark, empty panels seem to act as a backdrop, grouping various subjects or actions together, setting them apart from other sequences in the same scene. Secondly, coming back to page 45, we find that Butler not only groups panels together in this fashion, but sometimes the thicknesses of various panels will be such that they seem to carry their own gutter with them. At the top and bottom are panels that are interspersed with thick borders as if stamped onto the page, and this effect causes us to linger on and define them apart from others. A convention like this begins to blur the line between gutters and panels, begging further inspection.

Here we depart from McCloud for a while, exploring more of those conglomerated innovations that webcomic artists seem to employ, looking at how Butler uses the panels themselves. A far, far cry from the highly standardized approach of Watchmen, Butler varies just about everything about her panels. Firstly, as mentioned, the panels’ borders have varying thicknesses and colors. On page 41, we see a standard thin-line border vary according to modular usage. In the upper-right corner, an inset panel of a pig farmer with gun is drawn with thick, overlapping lines like wood panels—a convention that seems reserved for guns (see page 53). Then, in the lower half of the page, Viktor’s actions are not only varied in border thicknesses, but color too, as if Butler decided to employ whatever means were at hand to distinguish the panel border from the dark panel underneath: a convention that seems hardly used anywhere else, if at all. It is worth noting that some of these conventions are more prevalent in the latter half of the volume than at the beginning—yet another symptom of the ever-changing webcomic artist. Shapes are employed in effective fashion, from the gun-related hexagons already mentioned to diagonal panels like those on page 22, utilizing the old knowledge that diagonal lines inherently suggest movement since the eye must move along them.

One of the more unusual things Butler does is the previously mentioned panel insets. There can hardly be found a page wherein no panels overlap at all. This is one convention that seems more consistent in her work, thickening her lines on the insets to distinguish them, yet wanting them inset so as to keep them moving with the continuity of the scene at hand. If gutters are meant to create closure in their separation between images, perhaps with the insets Butler aims to create a sense of enclosure, wheeling our camera angle around as she wills, without removing us from the set. Her layouts build on this sense of enclosure. On the lower two-thirds of page 33, we have a larger setting flanked on the corners by hushed conversation between Mitzi and Zib. The way the panels are set on the diagonal not only creates a sense of balance in the layout but also a sense of movement that our eye follows—an evolution of the typical in-panel cues that are meant to draw our eye from panel to panel in older works.

Butler uses the panels themselves to direct our movement. As the use of diagonals is more prevalent in the latter half, it seems Butler developed her sense of movement as she went along, blossoming in subtle moments like when Pepper convinces Sedgewick to pay the horse doctor on page 56. We see the scene in the upper-left of the two, and suddenly, the panels themselves become almost a caricature of the focal character, switching points-of-view, tilting panels for Pepper’s whimsy, leaving Sedgewick’s panels straight to represent his rigidity, and the two bobbing along, up and down, with regard to their height—all within a matter of just a few seconds of reading. The rigidity of the more standard panel layout seen in the beginning is abandoned for constant—nearly instinctive—variety in layout throughout the end. Here, we come back roundabout to at least one of McCloud’s principles. On page 96 of Understanding Comics, he describes how multiple moments of time can be contained in a single panel and how the way the elements within the panel are laid out trains our eyes to move through time in a certain way. Though Butler does indeed utilize this kind of content as well (see bottom of page 10 and top and bottom of page 61), she winds up employing this principle on a panel-to-panel level, presenting a kind of organicism in layout that McCloud seemed unable to predict.

For this reason and more, it seems that Butler’s innovations in the modern age of digitally made and published art not only push the boundaries of what comics can be, but will forever hearken back to the principles of design in all visual and grammatextual art. These kinds of innovations had not occurred so widely before because previous models did not carry the kind of flexibility that a webcomic artist has access to: namely, time. Unlike comics artists, and even most graphic novelists, webcomic artists are in no hurry to finish anything. Their schedules are self-imposed, their delays self-inflicted. They, more than perhaps any other auteur form to come before them, are given room to grow and change, and perhaps uniquely, allowed and encouraged by adoring fans to encapsulate all those changes in volumes that may be bought and cherished by readers and aspiring artists. Webcomic artists explore the endless possibilities McCloud outlines. They represent a crosscut of the growth of the graphic novelist—an allegory of the industry itself.

Works Cited

Butler, Tracy J. Lackadaisy. Vol. 1, 2017, www.lackadaisycats.com.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Lettering by Bob Lappan, HarperPerennial, 1994.

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