Examining a comic (AKA what I usually do in my free time)

Personally, after having the TOK lesson on the many different meanings of pictures and words, I thought to myself - "Doesn't this apply a lot to my comics and drawings?" I hate (not really) having to relate this to art (again), but its simply one of the very first things that comes to mind when doing a subject on TOK on both WORDS and IMAGES. Because, funnily enought, comics are very mainly done out from these two.

A year ago I went to Philadephia (some part of it which I don't remember) to go to my cousin and her husband's house to stay over for the night. When I arrived I was flabberghasted (really) because of the enourmous quantity of books they possesed, but I was even more delighted to find out that my niece's husband shared a common like with me: comics. He had bookshelves, stacks on the floor, on top of the fridge - everywhere! I could have spent the rest of the summer right there reading away - but I only had one day. I coincidentially picked this fantastic book about comics. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It really was one of the best comic theory books I've ever read (actually, its the only one I've read -.-)

This book was just so fantastic at explaining the very tight connection between words and pictures - especially in the scan above (my favourite bit) where it mentions Rene Magritte's "Treachery of Images" (another fitting example of images and words working to make you double think if what you are seeing IS a pipe or just a drawing/painting of a pipe). 

So enough with that, I picked this comic below to see what i made out of it by just seeing at the images on it.

Panel one: Title page. A guy crouched over a piano, playing it/fixing it/sneezing/looking at it for no reason whatsoever/scratching his head/ect. A girl is watching him resting on the piano/she fell on the piano/sniffing the piano/trying to break the piano/etc.

Panel two: A girl walking to a house/ walking towards a brick wall/ hopping on the spot/brushing her feet on the pavement/playing musical statues/etc.

Panel three: A girl gets in a house and shuts the door behind her/she is admiring the door's texture/she supported herself on the door due to dizziness/she is just standing there/etc.

Panel nine: A dog demontrates his plan to attack the other red headed girl/a rabbid dog is attacking the girl/the dog pretends to fly/the dog has been kicked out of his house/etc.

Panel thirteen: A fight between the red headed girl and the girl occurs/their moving so fast around each other it can't even be drawn/a mini storm has appeared on the middle of the room/the artist randomly scribbled the panel/etc.

For me, as a comic artist, I always have to take care on the different poses and faces that I give my charecters so that, when i mix the images with my written script for the comic - it will make some sense for whoever sees it. Sometimes I'm not too successful and people often comment their own take of the comic - which is sometimes quite different from what I initially meant - but its definately a good thing that the people who see it have different views on it. (That, or i really need a lot more practice on it.)

Songs on right now: Crystal Ball - Keane, Supermassive Black Hole - Muse, Every Tear is a Waterfall - Coldplay

Indeed: Words have their way.

So, about this last class (28th Oct. 2011 ;P), we further examined the importance of the mix of words and images or symbols in order to convey an idea or show a situation to a person (inform). So, we began the lesson examining a small comic strip and we were asked to interpret what the images were trying to say (by the way, there were no words included in the comic strip). My partner (Isidro) and me came up with this sentence for it:

"A war has broken out somewhere in an African village and the villagers are being attacked by invading troops."

After writing this and sharing our sentence with all the other pairs, we found out that we all had slightly different outlooks on what was going on in the image. Some of us said that people were being killed, others that it was in the middle of the savannah, others said that the soldiers were coming to help them, and even one pair described the emotional aspects of the image. However, when we were shown the comic with the panels in different order, we found out that it could get a completely different meaning (In this case, the troops were coming to help the villagers from some previous attack or disaster they had...who knows really?).

Following this, we had to pick a question from one subject (Biology, Chemistry or Physics) and answer it with scientific terms. In my case I had to describe what light is:

"Light is a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. it is composed of three different colours - red, green and blue - all which combine to make white visible light. Light can be reflected, refracted, scattered and absorbed by different components and objects that it finds on its path. It travels with wavelenghts and its speed is of 3x10^18 ms-1." (A whole mouthful of scientific terminology.)

After this we were asked to list words that came up to our mind when hearing the word "light".

Life, creation, day, hapiness, hope, warmth, blinded, strong, powerful, invigorating, ect. 

This, from what i have learnt previously in my English lessons - is called a denotation. A denotation is when a word is described for what it means in a very precise and often scientific way. For example: 

"The Moon is the Earth's only natural satellite. Its distance is three times Earth's diameter and it moves around the Earth as this one spins around its axis around the Sun - hence enabling different faces of the moon to be visible at different stages of the month." (Another mouthful)

However, if you were to describe the moon or a word with a connotation, then the description would be totally different:

The moon holds a ghostly silver woman, perched upon a sea of blackness and stars, its faces gradually unveiling themselves for the human eye to admire (that was quite... bad :( )

So the point about a connotation is that ideas of emotions and relations to the word are brought up to describe it rather than describing it with the exact definition of it. This is why such language it commonly used in poems and novels that try to use literary devices such as similies and metaphors to convey a idea or feeling on the work (the advanteages of English A1 xD)

For me this lesson was really intresting as one can interpret an image in a million ways, but at the same time words can also have the same attribute as they may have a lot of different ways of seeing them depending on the person.