The Mystery Wen (Palomar)

This week I read "The Mystery Wen" in the comic book series "Palomar". It was a short comic strip but it looked interesting, so I read it. This week I will focus on the story line instead of the aesthetics of the illustrations. It was about a man who had a lump on his head and was scared to go to the doctor to find out what it was. Eventually he went and was told it was just a lump and to just put ice on it and it would go away. He went home to his wife and she had pity on him, but everyone else thought he was a real baby and said to suck it up. Eventually he had a bad dream and grabbed a stick and whacked his head. We find out later that it was just a bad tooth ache and when he hit his head with the stick, it knocked his tooth loose and he was finally better. I thought it was a good story because you are left guessing the entire story. I thought it could be some kind of growth or something bad, but it is only revealed at the end that it was just a tooth ache. The very last panel is the man saying that he has a pain in his side. This leaves you to think about what he will do now to cure that pain.. He will probably find a stick and start beating his side... lol

Alan's War

This week I read Alan's War. The drawing style was different from a lot of comics I've seen. I thought it was interesting that Guibert didn't draw the character's face on a lot of the drawings but realized it was only when they were so far away. He would also use simple lines and shapes for some of the expressions and it worked just fine. I really liked some of the larger panels, especially the chapter titles. each one had an illustration of a character on one page and the number of the chapter on the other. It was a nice juxtaposition. There were also some interesting layouts when he cropped an object in one panel and let it come into the next. I thought this was a good idea to break up the pacing and the rhythm of the panels. Overall, I thought that this was a good graphic novel with a ton of unique illustrations.