Hello friends! For this blog post, I want to write a mini reflection of the comics and zines I saw, and adhere to the guidelines to ensure we talk about McCloud’s ideas of time frames, closure, and other items he’s mentioned over the course of our time together in class, and throughout his novel.

The first thing I want to say was that this experience was absolutely amazing. I was talking with Kirk about how I felt more cultured and aware of the process that it takes artists to create work – in a lot of ways, art work is like writing a good poem: it can take years. One of Jericho Brown’s poems took ten years to complete. There is no linear or right way to create, publish and share with the world your form of art. I think, after visiting the exhibition yesterday, I have a better understanding of that.

Unidentified Feeling Object, by Mita Mahato.

With that being said, there were a lot of examples that were presented to us on Tuesday. The one that caught my eye, however, was a small zine that seemed to be crafted rather personally – the cover of the zine was handwritten, and the information itself was disclosed in a small, almost cardboard-like material, that was not fancy or textured. It was plain and honest. This particular zine was called “Unidentified Feeling Object”, by Mita Mahato.

When I opened the zine, I realized that the cover was an illusion to what was inside: the paper had been scanned. It was a collage, put together by the author, but it wasn’t the original draft of Mahato’s work. It had been run through a press of some sort, where the pages contained a glossy shine. The panels that caught my attention were on the second page. Though the zine is fairly short – three page turns short, I believe – Mahato manages to capture attention with not only the title, but with her creative and artistic abilities. The story  line on the pages with multiple panels had a very direct line: read from left to right, 

Unidentified Feeling Object, by Mita Mahato.

then move down and across to read from left to right. This was repeated for four panel sequences, and though shapes of the panels stayed the same, small things changed, like the movement of the spaceship, and the ripping of the heart from the craft.

The direction of the panels then changes on the following page, where the heart spirals down, and the reader’s eyes automatically follow the line of dashes that direct the heart to the forest below. The spaceship continues in a different direction, and flies off without it. This causes for three possible lines of direction to focus on: the spiraling heart, the spaceships trajectory into space, and perhaps even the rounding of the trees that seem to corner the right side of the page. Size is also something to pay attention to in this panel sequence: the spaceship is extremely small, but the heart and the trees are fairly large,

Unidentified Feeling Object, by Mita Mahato.

making the assumption that the ship is gaining distance from the “earth”.

As far as closure and time frames go for this zine, I would argue that there is limited closure, as Mahato gives us a pretty straightforward story arch. The panel space doesn’t change and seems to be very consistent, so I would argue for this particular zine that Mahato focused more on the design elements that we learned, rather than the design principles.

Thanks for hanging out with me this long! I hope that this gives an insight into my thought process for this assignment, and what I want to focus on in the future.