But You Did...

 A previous post had mentioned the downward slope of the lines in this short memoir and I am so glad that they did because I was without explanation for why this piece made me feel so sad and weary. It’s almost like when you watch a Tim Burton feel you know you’re going to feel creepy, dark and perhaps as if you just came off an acid trip. This memoir definitely uses line to create the tone. Everything seems sad and droopy throughout the panels. Even some of the text appears to be down. One thing that is great about this feature, I believe is that it really allows for the illustrator to capture movement. All the illustrations where it would be safe to assume that there is some sort of movement taking place, the line choice and apparently the stroke, allows for movement to be properly captured. For example, throughout the depictions of fields and the blades of dried grass, I can see the movement, I can see the wind pushing those blades of grass and it’s pretty amazing for the illustrator to be able to do this.

One thing I question in regard to line choice is whether it was intended to make the viewer/reader feel so down and somewhat empty. I feel that perhaps that is the way Lucy feels and is depicted throughout this short memoir. If the intention was to impress some of that emotion on the reader through this choice, I can definitely say it was successful. I felt her emptiness, her loneliness.

I thought it rather creative and superb that the author was able to create her own panels. It was the author/illustrators ultimate decision to create the space in which the events took place. There are times when there are no panels and I enjoyed that variation. There are also times when dialogue or pictures bleed into other panels or the gutter and again, I though it was very ingenious of the author to be able to take this kind of control of the story and space. She also takes this kind of vivid control when she places the “But I Can’t” 7 or so panels in. She is ultimately controlling when the story begins. These features definitely place the authors power to the forefront of the readers mind.

Lastly, and along the same lines of the authors executive power of created her own space and panels, or lack there of, I wonder if the way in which the panels are aligned was intended to somewhat confuse the reader about the order in which they should be read. I know that various other graphic memoirs, or depictions take advantage of this benefit and I wonder if that is the case here as well. In other words, was it intentional that there was no real indication of the direction in which the panels should be read? Or perhaps I am just thinking too much into this and it is just assumed that the reader will follow the natural direction of reading, from left to right.