Comic reading for class? Ok!

At first, I was really confused as to why we were reading comics. They reminded me of my philosophy class that I was tortured through last semester, “What are you sitting in? No, that’s not a chair. No, that’s not a seat either. What is truth? Does that desk even exist?” All of these questions hurt my head every time I think of them. The opening of the McCloud iconicity pieces had the same sort of effect. Something that I never discovered in that silly philosophy course was the concept of an icon being an idea, which is what these chapters have shown me. The difference between abstract and realism were portrayed effectively. But what does seeing things vividly have to do with writing? This question I thought to myself reminded me of a writing professor I had freshman year. He always told us, “Don’t tell me the story, show me the story.” He wanted us to be able to take our writing from passive to active, general to specific, and most important, universal to specialized.

The Hyper-Readers reading definitely brought it all together for me. While these cartoons were online and not printed, I definitely found myself skimming them more than actually reading them. In my mind, they were more of an e-text and not a full text text. When things are printed out, I read them easier and critique them more. If it’s on screen, my mind just doesn’t really seem to care as much about them or take them as seriously as the articles in print. It seems like I see the story, but I don’t really read the story. This is what I think reading visually is all about – reading with your eyes and not with your brain. There’s definitely a specific niche for this type of writing, as shown explicitly by McCloud. It’s a learned process, and honestly, I’m not it’s biggest fan.

The A/V projects have been an absolute joy for me to watch. They’ve each had their own special unique flair that has really been interesting to see. Some have been enjoyable like Carson’s elmo story or informative like Matt’s sidewalks. I think it’s neat how we all had the same project, but they each came out completely different. I really like the way that Savannah’s was filmed, but I legitimately have no idea how to do that stuff. I also have a greater appreciation of film majors after this project. They have to have such a creative eye for detail that I never knew about. The biggest problem for me was figuring out something to do that actually mattered. I’ve made picture slideshow things before, but never video with text. There was a huge chunk of nothing that was going on in my video that I was trying to split, but never got it to work out. I couldn’t make it “seam-less” of sorts, and it just looked silly, so I eventually gave up and decided to maybe try it in the future. As for color, my whole video is black and white, text included. I dabbled around a little bit with yellow and blue text coloring, but in the end, I settled for all black and white because I wanted the sort of gloomy-ness. Which is why I chose the music that I did. The music for me gave the whole poem more character and I wanted to see if music could change the watcher’s perspective other than just being based on the video and text alone.