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Graphic Novels – Introductory Notes

A. Graphic Novels: Mrs. Christopher PowerPoint

(download from class website)

1. What is the definition of a graphic novel?

2. How are graphic novels different from comics?

3. What are the different parts of a graphic novel?

4. In what order should you read a graphic novel?

B. An Introduction to the Graphic Novel Presentation by Vicky Maloy

(see link on class website - http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=bsides)

1. What artistic elements do graphic novels include (see page 10)? Explain what each of these
means in your own words.

2. What is a panel? What does it mean when the art on a page breaks out of the frame?

3. What is a gutter?

C. How to Read a Graphic Novel TED Talk by Michael Chaney

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAyEbgSPi9w

1. According to Chaney, why are so many movies based on comics?

2. Why do people like comics and cartoons, if they are less realistic than other forms of visual art?
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3. How do many graphic novels portray photograph (reliable or unreliable, when it comes to a
depiction of the truth)?

4. What is the supercool thing that Rorschach’s mask does in the graphic novel Watchmen?

5. What does Marjane Satrapi do with the first two panels in her graphic memoir, Persepolis?

6. What functions do captions serve in graphic novels?

Vocabulary:

Look up the bolded words at Dictionary.com, then write an explanation in your own words of what the
sentence means.

1. “It turns out that there are a lot of movies that take graphic novels as their templates.”

2. “Comic books love to give us the doll face, and imbue the doll face with mind.”

3. “Realistic depictions actually detract from our ability to take meaning from comics.”

4. “The second panel situates that cartoon avatar of the author in an individual panel all to herself
[…]”

5. “The photo-real media – the photograph – is somehow subordinate to the properties of

reflection that we get in the comic book. So it upends our normal understanding of a hierarchy
of arts. Where the photograph would be able to convey something that is transparently
objective, and the cartoon is just so obdurately mired in the artist’s subjectivity.”
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6. “His photographs are transubstantiated into the stuff of cartoons, and it is only on that level
that they bear meaning.”

7. “[…]In Art Spiegelman’s enormously popular graphic novel about his father’s Holocaust survival,
MAUS, in which most of the graphic novel depicts human beings as anthropomorphic mice.”

8. “Cinema: passive spectator. Comic: something else.”

9. “Comics, because they are constructed of two symbol systems, words and images, constantly
juxtapose these two symbol systems against each other, creating unique and inimitable effects.”

10. “Here our heroine is telling us that her world, her sense of identity, is determined by two
competing cultural influences […] the veil […] seems to bisect her.”

D. The Visual Magic of Comics TED Talk by Scott McCloud

http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_mccloud_on_comics

1. What are the three types of vision, according to McCloud?

2. How did McCloud’s experience with science influence his comic book art?

3. How can comics depict senses that we experience beyond vision?

4. What other forms of art in history also used a temporal map like comics?

5. What mistake did comics artists make when they moved from print comics to computer comics?
What solution did McCloud propose?
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6. What is the purpose of media, according to McCloud’s conclusion?

Vocabulary

1. “I tend to like science, where what we can see and ascertain are the foundation of what we
know.”

2. “Comics are a visual medium, but they try to embrace all of the senses within it. So the different
elements of comics like pictures and words and the different symbols and everything in between
that comics presents are all funneled through the single conduit of vision.”

3. “Comics presents a kind of temporal map.”

Draw me a comic of something that happened to you this weekend.