An excerpt from City: A Narrative Portfolio by Will Eisner.

After reading chapter 5 of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, I have a better understanding of how much line can effect the overall work and the way a reader interprets it. McCloud talks about how line can represent emotions such as anger, joy, serenity, tension, intimacy, madness, pride, anxiety, or how it can serve as senses such as loud, rank, cold, quiet, sour, warm, etc. During class on Tuesday, we visited the MASC in order to find examples of line in a text. I chose my piece to represent McClouds definition of line, because of the way all the lines are drawn in the same direction in the background. The way the skyline of buildings are all drawn in a vertical direction invokes the emotion of a dreary landscape for me, since it seems all the large buildings look the same. The idea of drawing in a vertical or horizontal direction is seen throughout the rest of this composition, and I believe the choices to draw like that work well to bring the entire piece together.

An excerpt from the Golden Legend, a collection of hagiographies by Blessed Jacobus de Varagine.

The other part of our McCloud reading had us look into the idea of interdependence when it comes to text and illustrations working hand in hand to invoke an idea or emotion that is otherwise impossible without the accompanying component. I spent a good amount of time walking around the examples that were laid out in the MASC, and I eventually chose this example simply because of it’s historical significance and the fact that I’m unable to read Latin. The illustration depicts Saint George standing with a group of people, and then in the next frame he is being stoned by those same people. If the text was written in English, then I’m confident the accompanying visual would work well with it.