Kristin Becker's DTC Classes at WSU

pages 250 and 251 of Thirteen Cats of My Childhood by Jesse Reklaw from The Best American Comics 2006 by Harvey Pekar and Anne Elizabeth Moore

With all graphic novels a key characteristic is framing.  Framing helps bring attention to certain scenes or emphasize parts of the story. Not only does framing consist in just graphic novels, but also in other parts of life like picture frames, your laptop screen, etc. Frames can show up in less obvious ways as well like when you crop an image. The cropped image has an implied frame which makes your eye focus on the new image. In comics, it is important to have good framing so the reader can easily follow the story. The two pages I chose from Thirteen Cats of My Childhood by Jesse Reklaw is an example of easy framing. When I was reading this comic it was pretty easy to read through because the framing layout was simple. Each frame had partial bleed to the picture (the drawings seem to continue off the page) which makes things more interesting to the comic. The partial bleed shows when the image “bleeds” off the sides from two or three sides but either the top or bottom of the image has a border or blank spot for text. You can imagine the whole scene instead of just focusing on the characters. The scene helps to understand the story. Some parts don’t have a literal frame, but an implied frame like the small section in the middle on page 250. However, that small scene is framed by the other frames around it and the page margin.

Page 5 from It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi

In Graphic Design the New Basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips the chapter on “Point, Line, and Plane” explains how all three of those principles are like the foundation of design. While at the library yesterday and looking through different graphic novels, all use point, line, and plane on different parts of the graphic novel. The terms point, line, and plane all have multiple meanings, but for now the terms will be defined in a graphic design view. A point can either be a literal dot or a central focus on something. Points can either make up a line or also used to make texture. For example, the page I used from the graphic novel It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi utilizes points as a form of texture for his graphic novel on the scenery, characters, and other details in the novel. When defining a line, it can be very literal or abstract. A line can either be a connection of multiple or two points, the path of a moving point, or it can be implied (in writing the margins in text are lines.) The page from the graphic novel have both literal and implied lines. Each frame on the page have lines within the images like the barbed wire fences, lines on the airplane, even between each of the frames, but those are more like implied lines. A plane is really complicated to describe. It’s related to line, a surface with height and width, and could also be described as a shape. It was really hard to find an example of plane, but I guess a physical plane would be the ground where the story is taking place.

Page 32 from the graphic novel “What It Is” by Lynda Barry

Formstorming is the process of thinking visually to come up with original new ideas on how to present something. In Graphic Design: The New Basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips formstorming is described as “a tool for designers to unlock and deepen solutions to basic design problems (13.)” When a designer goes through this process, they tend to do different exercises that involve repetition, patterns, and originality which helps brainstorm several nuanced ideas. Within Graphic Design: The New Basics, some example projects of formstorming include “A Plus” where the designer created one hundred different images representing the letter A, and “Record a Day” in which the designer creates a new album cover every day based on his music collection.

What It Is by Lynda Barry consists of questions like “what is an image?” and struggles with the issue of having little imagination as an artist. Each question has a collage of different images and different forms of texts that expand on what she is asking. One question that caught my attention the most was “how do we recognize something?” on page 32. It made me really think about how we use our minds to recognize something. After the main question was asked, there are different texts asking more questions that expand on how we recognize something like ” Where does it come from?”, “How do we know?”, etc. Also on this page, there is a small picture of Abe Lincoln with text saying ” Do you know if this is him?” We would all say “yes of course” because we recognize him by seeing pictures and learned about him in a United States history class. Barry was able to formstorm the question “how do we recognize something?” by restating the question through different ways and texts and through familiar images asking how do we recognize that. Basically she made different representations of her question by using her imagination, which helped to see different ways a formstorming process can go whether they be abstract, direct text, or images.

Lynda Berry’s book What It Is. Page 16

While reading the first fifty pages of What it is by Lynda Barry I was confused by everything at first, but as I read on I started to see a trend and understand what she means by all this. In some of the pages it seems dark, gloomy and depressing. And some are happier and more light and airy. As the book goes on through the 50 pages I realize that not only is each page demonstrating formstorming but also the whole book is. From asking questions like “what is an image” to “where are images found” and continually progressing to “what is a memory” and “can we remember something that we can’t imagine?”. Formstorming from reading Graphic Design: The new basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips means to brainstorm evolving ideas until you come up with something that is more sophisticated. You start with a simple term or image and continue until you get rid of the obvious ways of thinking and uncover the more creative and innovative ideas. One of the examples in the book is 100 iterations which really stood out to me. And formstorming really applies in page 16 of What It is by Lynda Barry, the page starts out with a statement “when images come to us”. This page is a collage of pictures some of which look to be hand drawn and others seem to be printed. On this page, you can really see the evolution of thoughts with all of the different that images come from, which to me best demonstrates formstorming.

With this page from Chris Ware, the framing is straight forward with little overlap. There are a few frames that have overlapping imagery that makes the comic feel more natural and scalable. The flowers stem on the top half is implied to be where the frame is, which is part of the margins and bleeds technique. As the comic needs to, the frames become frames within frames, making them smaller and making it easier to tell the story in a small amount of space. The title being centered in the paper draws the eye as it is the biggest part of the page, and after the viewer reads the title, they will naturally move to the top left corner.

Once the comic moves on, it get’s darker to match it’s more serious tone, and the scale of the frames starts to become more varied and duller in color. This sets a tone that tells the reader what was once a potential happy story is now a more realistic story. The cropping of the frames and the way the frames are set, there is little else to focus on aside from the characters. When the larger text shows on the screen, it draws the reader’s eye and makes it so there’s a parallel to the first part of the comic. What could have been a simple story that has been told a hundred times was crafted in such a way that it is interesting and compelling.

Branford, the best bee in the world by Chris Ware.

Page 1 from Richard Sala’s comic “Strange Question”

In the first page of Richard Sala’s comic, “Strange Question” the author uses various forms of framing. There are five different frames throughout this page that each frame a certain point of the story. Each of these frames are outlined by a  yellowish border line that is also part of the background. What I like about the framing in this comic is that the frames are not complete squares, the style of framing varies from different shapes. In the top left corner of the page there is a triangular frame that is framing the title of the comic, however within this frame there is also another frame framing the actual text, this is considered frames inside of frames. To emphasis the title of the comic in this frame the author adds a border around it to make it stand out. Throughout the rest of this page you can also see that the author creates a text box for each frame, this is called text over image. Each frame has its own border around the text separating it from its image underneath. Throughout the frames in this comic there is also a shift in scale between the frames. In the top frame there is (what I consider) a medium shot, there are two characters and you can see a bit of there surrounding. Then in the next two frames the scale shifts and there is a close-up of the main character, emphasizing what she is doing.  Followed by another shift in scale, which zooms out and shows a figure creeping into a scary looking house.Overall, I feel like the different form of framing seen throughout this comic make it more appealing and interesting to the reader.