For my final comic blog, I'm doing the Order of the Stick by Rich Burlew.  I've seen panels of this floating around the internet for years, but I never read it in context until this week.  I was surprised by how much I liked it, I think the simplistic drawings kept me from looking into it sooner, but after picking out a few pages for this post, I went back to the beginning of the comic and read the first 90 pages.

I found it interesting how each page could be a self contained story, and yet there is an overarching plot, and what happens in the end of one page carries over to the next.

As for the art, one of the first things I noticed was how the box was not a perfect rectangle, it seems to be expanding in the middle, and the inner panels aren't always straight either.  The second thing I noticed was how the speech bubbles often expand outside of the box.  I think that for this particular comic that works because the characters often reference the fact that they're in a comic, so it doesn't seem as weird as it would in a more serious comic.

This week I'm doing a Garfield comic by Jim Davis.

I've never read a Garfield comic before (Though, of course, I was familiar with the character from pop culture).  I never realized how much of a jerk Garfield was.

One thing that surprised me about this comic was the punchline.  I was expecting the ball to explode, not inflate Jon's head.  I also noticed that the text is entirely made up of onomatopoeia and none of it is in speech bubbles.  Also the text in the CLAP panel is made more interesting because of its color.

Another thing I thought was interesting was the addition of a third character in the last panel.  Having her reaction to the event really sells the punch line.

This week, I'm doing The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe graphic novel, abridged and illustrated by Robin Lawrie. (based on the C.S. Lewis book)

The first thing I noticed about this comic is how much text there is, most comic books have mostly pictures and text, but this one has a lot of narration.

The second thing I noticed is that most of this text happens in the white space between the panels, and the panels just kind of trail off, only a few of them have clear borders.

Every page does have a border and the speech bubbles all have borders, even during the conversation between Lucy and Tumnus.

Another interesting place with the speech bubbles is when Aslan speaks off screen, and the bubble goes onto the next page.

This week, I went to the Museum of Science and Industry and saw the Treasures of Walt Disney Archives exhibit.  I have been to the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco twice before, so I didn't learn anything new about Walt Disney from the Museum, but the Family Museum cuts off when Walt Disney died in 1966 whereas this exhibit continued and had things from more current films.

This exhibit also had more production elements, including the books that open Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty and the costumes worn in Enchanted. This exhibit had a scale model of the Multiplane camera but I saw the real one in the family museum.  There were also a lot of production papers, including concept art and storyboards.

I thought the exhibit was fascinating.  Being a Disneyphile already, I was very interested to read and see everything.  It was especially interesting to see some of the maquettes and other figures.  I also liked seeing the behind the scenes work of the films and shorts, especially the earlier ones, like the Alice shorts.  I've watched them on YouTube but it was different seeing them on a large scale, getting to see other patrons' reactions.

This week, I found the Wonder Woman comic Ends of the Earth by Gail Simone, Aaron Lopresti and Bernard Chang. I think it's a graphic novel, at least that's what the library classified it as.

I've never read a super hero comic before so it was interesting to see where these well known characters originated.  I was a little confused at the start.  I guess they expected that only people already familiar with Wonder Woman would read this.

I was surprised to see how it used boarders on some pages.

and sometimes used interesting gutters

Even when it has a regular gutter there are some panels that are marked with special icons like swords and skulls.

This week I found a comic called Theater Hopper by Tom Brazelton

When I first found this I thought the text was funny, but then I noticed that the artist didn't include any gutter, just a thick border.

I also noticed that the color of the wall changes from panel to panel.  I thought it was interesting to see how the artist handled the use of a copyrighted character.  Since I haven't seen this comic before, I'm not sure how much the character changed.

The last thing I noticed on this comic was that even though the camera angle remained the same through all the panels, the zooming changed to add a little variety.

This week I found a newspaper comic by Brian Basset called Red and Rover.

Of all the comics in the newspaper this week, this one jumped out at me because of its unusual paneling.

The way it's structured and the way the dog is facing in each panel lead to confusion in whether he is coming or going, communicating the idea that he's been doing this for a long time.  I also noticed how most of the panels are blue, except for the really orange one.  That one panel helps set up the idea that it's getting late.  The green in the first and last panels also helps the viewer know where to start and stop.