Lit. Comics - Emory Widman

Blankets by Craig Thomson is a beautiful story which portrays the life of a young man growing up with his brother in Wisconsin. Craig grows up with his lower middle class family dealing with the struggles of growing up. This is a very down to earth story which fantastically emulates what Craig's life was truly like when he was growing up, It keeps this very homey feel throughout the entire novel. The excellent illustration and great dialogue really pushes this story forward making it an easy read which you don't want to put down. Not only was the story very well concluded, it nods to motifs throughout the course of the story which adds a very satisfying element to what you read.

The Arrival is a wonderful story with no words which beautifully depicts the struggle of the immigrant. Through masterful visual storytelling shaun tan is able to give the reader so much information, using a combination of iconic imagery and excellent world building he also achieves a whole different level of fascinating; Shaun Tan depicts a very strange world which is similar yet very different from ours, yet within it's own self-contained story it is able to communicate the same ideas effectively by creating some parallels to our own world. 

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud was a phenomenal read, it offered wonderful insights into the creation of comics and the lives of comic creators. There was much and more to learn from this comic about comics. While reading this I was able to immediately recognize the love for comics that Scott has, and felt throughout the entire thing. Scott's points on trying to define comics was a particularly interesting topic to cover, because it does in fact seem to be a somewhat difficult thing to discern from other sequential media. There was so much that i was happy to learn about from this comic I especially enjoyed what he said about the space between the panels being figured out by the brain as opposed to simply showing every second we are able to gather enough information to get a complete picture. Another topic that really piqued my interest was the differentiation between perceived and received information and how as you get closer to the middle of the scale you get very simp

Frank in The River was a surrealist wordless comic which works surprisingly well, there are excellent uses of visual clues in order to progress the story with more than just showing us, it did a good job of giving the reader two plus two instead of four. By letting the reader figure out what is going on, it really makes the reader much more involved in the story than if it simply force fed the information. This odd story really works well on it's own as a self contained scenario; totally unrealistic yet still believable because it follows a set of rules the story sets up.