Hannah Miodrag
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617038044
- eISBN:
- 9781621039556
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617038044.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
Comics consists of four graphic threads: narrative breakdown, panel composition, page layout, and style. According to Robert C. Harvey, style is the “most illusive” and hardest to account for among ...
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Comics consists of four graphic threads: narrative breakdown, panel composition, page layout, and style. According to Robert C. Harvey, style is the “most illusive” and hardest to account for among these elements, and is difficult to quantify using a linguistic semiotic model based on a decomposable system of units. Moreover, drawing style is extremely qualitative and impressionistic. This chapter examines the aesthetic style of comics by analyzing two texts based on the standard practices of formalist art criticism: Charles Burns’s Black Hole and Hannah Berry’s Britten and Brülightly. It describes what Joshua Taylor calls the “expressive content” of artworks and analyzes the impact of comics’ stylistic elements, such as line and brushwork, light and shadow, texture, mass, order, proportion, balance, pattern, figures, and composition. The chapter offers close readings of pictures in Black Hole and Britten and Brülightly in the context of their particular drawing styles. It also considers the impressionistic responses triggered by particular line styles and discusses how a formal critique of a comics text differs from the sort of works traditionally examined as fine art.Less
Comics consists of four graphic threads: narrative breakdown, panel composition, page layout, and style. According to Robert C. Harvey, style is the “most illusive” and hardest to account for among these elements, and is difficult to quantify using a linguistic semiotic model based on a decomposable system of units. Moreover, drawing style is extremely qualitative and impressionistic. This chapter examines the aesthetic style of comics by analyzing two texts based on the standard practices of formalist art criticism: Charles Burns’s Black Hole and Hannah Berry’s Britten and Brülightly. It describes what Joshua Taylor calls the “expressive content” of artworks and analyzes the impact of comics’ stylistic elements, such as line and brushwork, light and shadow, texture, mass, order, proportion, balance, pattern, figures, and composition. The chapter offers close readings of pictures in Black Hole and Britten and Brülightly in the context of their particular drawing styles. It also considers the impressionistic responses triggered by particular line styles and discusses how a formal critique of a comics text differs from the sort of works traditionally examined as fine art.
Jay Griffiths
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198801900
- eISBN:
- 9780191840456
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198801900.003.0002
- Subject:
- Law, Human Rights and Immigration, Philosophy of Law
This chapter uses theBlack Hole as a metaphor for depression based on personal experience with the disease. Like a Black Hole, depression consumes and contorts time. Depression sucks an entire human ...
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This chapter uses theBlack Hole as a metaphor for depression based on personal experience with the disease. Like a Black Hole, depression consumes and contorts time. Depression sucks an entire human life into itself, the chapter states. Nothing can withstand its relentless tug into sheer black nothingness; it is a force field of pure negativity, a Black Hole. Depression slows one’s sense of time as—in what is called ‘gravitational time dilation’—an object falling into a Black Hole appears to slow down as it approaches the event horizon, taking an infinite time to reach it. The chapter describes the condition when in a depressed state and says depression is an illness which seems to punish the sufferer with isolation, noting that isolation is different from loneliness and solitude. The chapter also suggests that animals are like the opposite of a Black Hole; for example, cats can be extremely important to someone who is depressed.Less
This chapter uses theBlack Hole as a metaphor for depression based on personal experience with the disease. Like a Black Hole, depression consumes and contorts time. Depression sucks an entire human life into itself, the chapter states. Nothing can withstand its relentless tug into sheer black nothingness; it is a force field of pure negativity, a Black Hole. Depression slows one’s sense of time as—in what is called ‘gravitational time dilation’—an object falling into a Black Hole appears to slow down as it approaches the event horizon, taking an infinite time to reach it. The chapter describes the condition when in a depressed state and says depression is an illness which seems to punish the sufferer with isolation, noting that isolation is different from loneliness and solitude. The chapter also suggests that animals are like the opposite of a Black Hole; for example, cats can be extremely important to someone who is depressed.
