Tannner Wade

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...

       Something I felt really spoke to me while reading Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” was his section on abstraction and how humans like to see themselves in everything. It wasn’t a new concept to me, especially considering my field in art and animation, but this was the first time I think I really saw somebody else go so deep into discussion about why this was the case. His explanation about the image we see of ourselves in our own mind actually makes a lot of sense. There is only so much our brain can fill in from our own memory and so the image we keep of ourselves, in itself, is an abstraction because it’s impossible for us to remember every single detail about our face without looking at it. Because everybody has this wildly abstracted image of themselves in their own mind, they are able to connect so deeply with, say, a stick figure or even a simple smiley face. The simpler the abstraction, the more universal it is.  I see a lot of manga and ani...