Week 4: The Comic Book

This week I decided to look into Hergé's work and read The Adventures of Tin Tin: Explorers on The Moon. I was excited to reach this point in the curriculum, as I'm an avid comic book reader, and this format is the most familiar to me.

The first thing that stuck out to me about this reading, were the vibrant—and plentiful—colors. Yes colors were present in the past readings we've done, but typically they were muted pastels, or just straight up black and white to save on printing costs.

I found the familiarity of the comic incredibly pleasing, and that came from multiple aspects. First, obviously the layout. The use of familiar dialogue boxes and directional lines gave a feeling of a contemporary comic book. As a side note, I also found it incredible interesting how the artist changes font between the narrator bubbles and the speech bubbles. Typically I've seen the bubbles change shape, or the text italicize, but in this comic the narrator's voice is in cursive. I've never seen this before, but I found it an interesting–and pleasing–element.

Aside from that, the main character, Tin Tin, and his dog Snowy, also felt very real and familiar. Prior to this, my only knowlege of Tin Tin was the (creepily motion capture animated) movie that came out six years ago. That being said, while reading the comic, I felt like I knew this character and had known him for quite a while, despite my lack of knowledge beforehand.