Emotive Color in “But I Can’t”

This story seemed much more condensed than the others we’ve read so far. Perhaps it’s just the intensity of the storyline, the tight framing and the poignant plot that got me going. What I noticed the most, however was how the vibrant colors seemed to emphasize the tone and mood of each frame. For example, in the jovial atmosphere of the dorm room in the beginning is glowing with bright yellows and oranges, and then as the narrator goes farther into the recesses of her memory the colors change to muted blues, grays and greens. The short story takes something that seems silly and adds a semi serious narrative to it. The female narrator is having a light hearted conversation when a question asked by one of her comrades triggers a childhood memory. She is remembering a situation in which she wishes she could believe in the supernatural (aliens, in this case), so that another, more realistic option may not be true (that her old friend was harmed or killed one of her night walks).

            There is something exaggerated and lifelike about the drawings in this story. I feel like the stronger face structures create more empathy for the characters than the other stories that we’ve read that employed obviously drawn characters. The frames where we were close to Harriet or the narrator added to the intensity as well. When the narrator giggles at Harriet we can thoroughly feel her disdain, and when the narrator hears of Harriet’s disappearance we can feel her regret as she is shown in a panel lying facedown on her bed. The overlap of the panels lent a dreamlike quality to the sequence, and made me truly feel like it was from memory. Overlapping also made it more memory-like, because when we recall events they tend to be in pieces, not in perfect chronological frames. There was an awesome connection made between what Harriet wanted to believe about her mother and what the narrator later wants to believe about Harriet’s disappearance.

Themes and tunneling in Fun Home

Let me start by saying I have never taken into account how heavily presentation in a graphic novel mattered until I read fun home this time. Having lost my copy I purchased freshman year at Mills I downloaded it to my kindle, which shows only two boxes per page instead of whatever the physical copy has. The two boxes shown by the kindle are on top of each other in the middle of the page, with bright white free space around them. My chef friend would call this “staging.” It seems to emphasize more of what Bechdel is saying, and indeed, I had a deeper reading this time.

Bechdel seems to be a great fan of themes. There is the literary theme that her and her father share and is referenced in story and analogy form throughout the book. There is the Greek myth theme, which she begins and ends with. Perhaps the most obvious is the sexuality theme. In Bechdel’s memoir, sexuality, or the repression of it, is a catalyst for suppressed hostility on her part, her parent’s torturous marriage and her father’s death. In the end, Bechdel admits that perhaps she projects the identity of “gay” and not bisexual or something else, so she can keep him to herself.

In one of my other classes we’re talking about Virginia Woolf and how she “tunnels.” By tunnel I mean introduce a character or situation and then contextualize it with a background facts that end up being stories in themselves. This happens over and over again in Bechdel’s descriptions of her father; we learn more and more about him by this technique being used. Bechdel also seems to use a circling technique as the story isn’t completely linear. Such as with the snake story, Bechdel first tells it, and then tells it again in her vignette about her journaling and compulsions. This retelling of events brings depth the second time around, and this is the first book we’ve read so far that utilizes this kind of revisiting.

-Trinidad

Lucky

In her graphic book, “Lucky,” Gabrielle Bell tells stories of her life as a struggling twenty something trying to make a living as a cartoonist in New York. I couldn’t help but draw parallels between Bell’s book and the HBO TV show “Girls” in that the stories aren’t glamorous, and the protagonists display what women in their twenties are really like as opposed to what they are portrayed as in mainstream media. Women in their twenties aren’t the self assured, oversexed socialites on “Gossip Girl,” they’re neurotic, struggling and overthink-y.

The stark imagery Bell uses is effective in the sense that the bare lines force the reader to pay attention to the storyline instead of being distracted by color or a perfect replication of reality. Bell herself notes other’s take on her illustrations in her vignette about her art teacher, whose emphasis is more on fine art and detail. In one of the panels in the story, he uses her as an example of what not to do.

The introduction to this book goes a long way in explaining the motives of the author. The fact that she put the introduction into comic form is even more genius. To say “My ambition was to do more than a comic diary. I’d take each day and make it into a story,” prepare the reader for stories that are more meditations on everyday life than they are outlandish or in possession of a perfect narrative arc.

The Imposter's Daughter

Sandell’s choice of elements tells her story successfully using background narration accompanied by illustrated anecdotes. Whatever the narration box at the top states, the series of illustrated boxes below acts out. A good example (though there ‘s a good one on every page throughout), is when she starts the section “Good-bye Doubt” on page 186. The narration box reads “ I was in Toronto to do another interview. When I returned to my hotel room, I dialed Ben.” Below this unfolds her strained conversation with her boyfriend in which she begs to get back together with him. The tension in this kind of background narration lies in the expectations it creates. When reading a traditional novel, the narrator doesn’t lay out a situation and then give an example of that situation again and again in a sequence, the story is more woven. This graphic novel employs the background narration/anecdote formula over and over again in a way that may not feel seamless but still has it’s own rhythm. In this way, the primary criterion of truth is that which is explicated in each of the animated panels; the images show what the narrator lays out flatly and brings it to light.

The tone throughout Sandell’s book stays light and conversational even throughout the dark moments. The foundation of this tale is how shocking and true it all is, and how shocked Laurie is in each stage of finding out the disquieting facts about her dad. Regardless of how strong she feels, the light in the novel never wavers, that is, the pictures are always brightly lit, and she is never self deprecating or shy about any aspect of this memoir. Perhaps it is the association I have between brightly colored comic books and superheroes  that makes this brightly colored graphic novel seem light in tone throughout. Sandell never judges herself, she is more introspective than critical. When she recounts her four years of traveling, she describes the experience more as a fractured identity problem than a problem with her as a person. On page 57 she has a multiple box description of each of her split identities. Sandell shows herself as a product of her father’s lying parenting job without directly pointing a finger at him through the whole book. It is interesting to see a concept revealing subtly and slowly throughout a book that is made up of to the point sketches.