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.