IMAGINATION
This weeks reading was very interesting though was a quite unusual and unexpected medium for a uni student. Comics. I have never really read comics, I went through an embarrassing Garfield obsessed stage but that’s only ever as far as I have got. My brother also gets me a tin-tin comic book every time he goes overseas. Though my knowledge is rather limited to what they do. This reading was really interesting as it’s not generally something I have considered in the past. Comics as a form of media require us as an audience to make assumptions.
Summarising it, it simply involves panel-to-panel transitioning:
- Moment to moment
- Action to action: distinct progression
- Subject to subject: within a scene or idea
- Scene to scene: transport us across significant space and time
- Aspect to aspect: a wondering eye
- Non-sequitur: no logical relationship between panels
It is easy enough to understand now that it is written before me, but I had just never thought about it. I guess that’s what an assumption is though; we atomically think things as though our minds are wired to do so.
It is really crazy how you can see movement in something so one-dimensional like a comic. Reading this was just images on a page, and the quick overview I did before beginning led me to believe I just had series of images ahead of me. But illustrators are able to do something more. Somehow movement is created panel to panel. It’s a bit like a flipbook I guess, except it’s our minds filling in the missing frames. It is astonishing what our own assumptions can do when fed a media text to analyse. It is so very powerful.
I really like the quote at the end of the comic; its last line is as follows:
— just as we all assume, everyday that there’s more to life than meets the eye. All I ask of you is a little faith — and a world of imagination.
