Assignment 1 10/2/2019

Jessica Abel’s comic Amuse Yourself was an engaging form of story-telling that utilized illustrations to heighten the reader’s experience. I have been familiar with comic designed storytelling since I grew up reading Manga, which are Japanese comic books. I’ve adapted the ability to apply the written text to the illustrations as a guide for further submerging myself into the given scenario. I believe that effective storytelling engages the reader with the story and allows them to further develop their vision of the scenarios provided. For example, a comic would present a drawn image of the character speaking, and the reader can be capable of using given character and imagine the scenery and context around it. Amuse Yourself was effective in engaging the readers through the written text. The detailed drawings of each character allowed the readers to clearly identify the speakers in addition to the narrative speech bubbles. The comic design allows the story to be more realistic than traditional writing, as it shares the author’s idea of how the story should be seen. While the characters are trying to prove their point, the key words in their speech bubble are italicized so that the reader can internally imagine the character emphasizing those words. The author also allows the readers to visually understand the character’s thought process, as we can see when Rob Rosenthal and Soran Wheeler are explaining sentence structures. While the illustrations provided sufficient visualization for the story, the comic began to seem repetitive and more text focused as I continued to read. After adjusting to the characters that were drawn, It was more difficult for me to give attention to the drawings due to its repetitiveness. In this comic, the images seemed to clearly support the text through understanding who was speaking, rather than more vivid images to heighten what the characters were saying. This made me question the effectiveness of the ratio between the story being told through imagery and text. Is the story told through a comic design more effective with the text supporting the imagery, or the imagery supporting the text?