Week 4: Herge and TinTin (2)

     For the section on TinTin, I chose to read “The Blue Lotus”, “The Crab With the Golden Claw” and “The Black Island” by Hergé. The thing that stood out to me the most in all of Hergé’s work is how he’s able to mix complexity into his very simple drawing style. All of his characters are very heavily stylized and stripped down to the most based elements--heck, the main character is basically a walking lollipop with a cowlick-- but even still there persists a certain level of attention to detail. All of the clothes wrinkle and fold as the characters move, and each has their own very distinct look. Where I feel this shows through most however most, however is in the world he builds around the characters. All you have to do is look at the railway station in “THe Black Island” to the airport in “Golden Claw” and you’ll see wonderfully clean architecture that is immediately recognizable to the eye. Even the vehicles he draws, like boats, planes and automobiles  look like they were ripped straight out of a manual, and yet somehow he manages to mix these to styles perfectly. 


I also appreciated how it doesn’t let it’s more simplistic art style limit the kinds of stories it can tell. Sure it has fair bits of funny moments and the more cartoony aesthetic works well for the gags it does try to pull off, but at the same time its able to tell really fun and pretty in depth crime/mystery stories without losing any of the interest.                  


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Arrival by Suan Tan (3 Pts.)

       I think the story of "The Arrival" perfectly encapsulates the idea of a stranger in a strange land, or in this case, the experience of immigrants and refugees who have traveled from far and wide to make their new life in a distant country, far away from the familiarity of friends and family. I especially love how Tan is able to depict all of this without the use of words. In the first part we see a man packing a family portrait into a singular suitcase; one only big enough to fit the essentials of life that he will be taking with him on his long journey. As he says goodbye to his wife in child, we see looming in the sky dozens of dark, smokey tendrils of some ginormous unseen monster twisting and contorting around every street corner. Tan, without the use of words, has this abstract means by which he creates a sense of tension and danger. While the exact meaning of these black tendrils is loose -- Is it war? Famine? Disease? Poverty?-- there is an undeniable connotatio
Read more

Week Three: The Comic Strip (4)

The comic strip I decided to focus on from this week's reading went by the name of "Polly and Her Pals". From the bits that are featured in the collection, It wasn't that easy to figure out why exactly it was named that way, but after some research, I found out that the comic strip was originally centered around a young woman by the name of Polly Perkins, but as time went on it slowly started to shift focus to the people surrounding her, namely her various family members, hence the name change to“Polly and Her Pals”. I think what stood out the most to me about this comic was the dialogue. All of Polly’s family spoke in a manner that was very informal, with a lot of abbreviated words and eye dialect thrown into the mix, which made for a very interesting, if not slightly confusing, read. I found myself having to go over every speech bubble at least two or three times before I felt like I got a good grasp of what each character was saying. At the same time, I found it
Read more