Cat Leivonen - Literature of Comics & Graphic Narrative

  During my first read-through of The Arrival by Shaun Tan, I remember how lonely the woman and girl felt when holding hands after the man’s departure at the very beginning; therefore, their reunion at the end was very satisfying and moving, to the extent that I felt so much compassion and empathy for the characters that I actually cried. The way he called out to them while running and waving his arms before their embrace, deeply touching. After having spent maybe a year apart, while he struggled through his adjustments into this new place, missing them, he finally had them by his side again. Tan’s book had some of the most creative expressions of the passage of time that I have ever seen. I loved the pages with only clouds and flowers because they illustrated the length of time he spent apart from his loved ones while trying to learn about the new place in which he had arrived which added poignancy to their reuniting. When he first leaves, the hauntingly looming cloud daunts as an...

  Starting on page 187 The Comic Book History of Comics by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey briefly discusses Japanese manga and anime. As an animation buff, I loved seeing some of my favorite ground-breaking characters from animation. Astro boy, otherwise known as Tetsuwan Atom (Iron-Armed Atom) created by Tezuka Osamu who loved Disney, was the first Japanese animated series that incorporated the "anime" technique of using fewer frames to lower production costs and speed up the process for weekly episodes. Sparked by American animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, creators of The Flintstones, this idea revolutionized animation for television in Japan. By using panning and other camera actions on the rotoscopes or only changing a small part of the frames within a shot, like mouth movements, anime artists can create the illusion of movement without drawing out as many complex frames per shot. Some early versions of comic books in Japan, i.e. the emakimono (handscroll), in...