Hello viewer(s)/follower(s) and welcome to another comic literature blog post. This week's blog installment is on a book that breaks down everything we know about a comics and why they exist and how we see them as a form of representational reality. If any of you are wondering what I am talking about, if not then your questioning is at an end, for I am talking about the wonderful and insightful "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" by Scott McCloud.

This insightful and articulated piece of deep thought and understanding of the entirety of what is the comic book, is actually something that I have myself have read previously many years ago while still attending high school at a summer class program for comic creation. So this was actually a rather nice surprise to  refreshing lesson that I had all but forgotten many years ago. In this illustrated academic book the viewer is not just being reading something narrated by the author to be addressed to the reader by mere words, but the creator himself. Scott took a comic like approach for this book and had himself guide the reader in what makes us fascinated with comics and explains ho we are able to translate what we are seeing/reading into a story where we identify people, environments, creatures, emotions and even the language. Scott provides the viewer with a fun variety of art forms and narrative techniques that the viewer of this book or any comic book can understand. What is really something interesting that he provides is the break down of simple designs and illustrations of faces into a recognizable form and how we recognize them as a human face, and breaks past the simple two dots and a half circle inside a circle (to become a face) into the simplistic form of text and how that can be worked at in the opposite direction; from basic to detailed. One thing I will say about this book that I would say be problematic to the viewer is that even though much of his examples are very informative and solid evidence to understand, they are very noticeably dated. From a personal view (based on several new issues from rising publishing companies that I have seen) there are more and more artists that are experimenting with different narrative forms of illustration that could be great examples of work to feature in this book for more diversity in his art studies. But even though much of examples are dated, they are very noticeably used as reference for new art forms to be taken in these days in the comic book industry. Perhaps Scott could do a revision or an edited re-release of his book in the future, but if not, then I really see no harm done in not doing so. In conclusion, I would say that this is something any aspiring comic book writer or artist should read to understand the diverse techniques that exist in the world of art and graphic narration.

For this, my first blog entry, I will be discussing my personal review of the silent graphic novel of "The Arrival" by Shaun Tan. Now I can tell right off the bat that you, (the reader(s)) are wondering why I chose to personally call this a "silent" graphic novel. Before I begin the brief and in depth review of this novel, I will explain my choice in added words. Simply put, the word "silent" (in this blogger's opinion) is used to describe a book hat tells a story simply through imagery and with the use of absent text such as description, location and even word and thought text. This graphic novel tells a story through the power of visual art. In this novel's case, illustrations.

Right then; back to the importance that is the review! Based on the type of colorizing of the paper and how aged it appears and how the images are well sketched (in what appears to be some sort of charcoal) it is obvious that the author is trying to depict a historic emotion to this novel and the many stories the reader will find within it. As I looked through the pages and began to take in the breathtaking view I started to put everything together that this novel was a wildly surreal utopian past modernist representation of the stories and emotional journey's of foreigners who had to make the life changing decision of immigrating to a new for hopes to obtaining a better life for themselves and their families. The reader will mainly follow the story of one immigrant in particular who appears to be on a mission to find his lost female companion. Now weather this woman is his younger sister or his wife or even his cousin, that I believe is open to interpretation. Along the way, the author provides us with a little more insight on the struggle of immigration as we are shown different side story backgrounds of helpful characters our protagonist encounters along the way of his own journey and provides more knowledge of emotional struggles and hardships other immigrants had to endure and overcome while making a new home for themselves.