Monday
Analyzing Stylistic Choices – Realistic vs. Abstract
Using images with text to convey information is common. Think about, for example, magazines, children’s books, and any science textbook you have ever read. In this activity, you will be discussing some panels from Scott McCloud’s textbook Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, which is written as a comic to explain comics.
McCloud, Scott. “Chapter Two: The Vocabulary of Comics.” Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Harper Collins, 1994, p. 30.
Considering the Purposes that Images Can Serve
Images that accompany text can serve different purposes:
Tuesday
Original Superhero Google Slide Storyboard
Wed/Thur (block day)
Original Superhero Origin Story Comic Strip
Friday
Present Scholarship Essay Prompt
Analyzing Stylistic Choices – Realistic vs. Abstract
Using images with text to convey information is common. Think about, for example, magazines, children’s books, and any science textbook you have ever read. In this activity, you will be discussing some panels from Scott McCloud’s textbook Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, which is written as a comic to explain comics.
McCloud, Scott. “Chapter Two: The Vocabulary of Comics.” Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Harper Collins, 1994, p. 30.
- Why would McCloud choose to write his textbook as a comic?
- Put into your own words the concept of “amplification through simplification?” In other words, what does it mean to amplify something? How does a more simplified cartoon amplify an idea?
- Find a panel in Hawkeye books 1 or 2 that seems to you a strong example of amplifying an idea by using a simplified, more abstract drawing.
Considering the Purposes that Images Can Serve
Images that accompany text can serve different purposes:
- An image may enhance the ideas in the text that it accompanies. Such images might add visual interest to the text but no new meaning. All the information is in the text.
- An image may support the ideas in the text it accompanies. For example, a chart of statistics can add support for the main claim in a paragraph.
- An image may extend the ideas in the text that it accompanies. That is, the picture adds to the message or somehow changes the text and may even tell an entirely different story.
- In your opinion, which of these purposes describes McCloud’s panels here? Do the images “enhance,” “support,” or “extend” the ideas contained in his dialogue bubbles?
- Find a Hawkeye panel in which the artwork merely enhances the dialogue bubbles or narrative boxes, adding no meaning to the panel.
- Find a Hawkeye panel in which the artwork supports the ideas in the dialogue bubbles or narrative boxes. The words communicate the main idea, and the artwork supports it.
- Find a Hawkeye panel that extends the ideas in the dialogue bubbles or narrative boxes—that is, the image adds to or changes the ideas in the text.
- In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, after he introduces “amplification through simplification,” he has readers look again at the same example of five differently drawn faces, and he says this: “The ability of cartoons to focus our attention on an idea is, I think, an important part of their special power, both in comics and in drawing generally. Another is the universality of cartoon imagery. The more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe” (31).
Tuesday
Original Superhero Google Slide Storyboard
Wed/Thur (block day)
Original Superhero Origin Story Comic Strip
Friday
Present Scholarship Essay Prompt