Author: btsai

I broke my first bone when I was twnety-one years old.  I was in Florida on Spring Break with my girlfriend, and as per the custom of Bike Week in Daytona Beach, we were pickling our livers on the sunny beaches.  After several hours of drinking, and massive increases to my BAC, we were in an Irish Pub with many locals discussing the greatest month in sports, which is March Madness.  The University of North Carolina basketball team is very dear to me, the tarheels are the greatest team ever, and I will defend them with my life.  Well being sloshed out of my mind, a Florida native was quick to bring up winnings consecutive national championships by Florida, and proceeded to speak quite poorly of UNC.  The blasphemous remarks were quick to make me fly off the handle, punches were thrown, and subsequently, bodies were thrown out of the bar.

I woke up the next morning with my hand the size of a large grapefruit, I had broken the fifth digit in my right hand, which they call a boxer’s fracture.  Quite unpleasant.

Not being a particularly big fan of comics, or what I had previously perceived as comics, I was not very excited about diving into this book.  After getting a quarter way through the reading; however, my mind had changed.  The direction of the writing was different than I had originally anticipated, I was expecting more of a focus on what we now think of what comics are, but I got much more than that.  The history, though I thought it was a bit stretched, as well as the building blocks of comics and then the make up and structure of comics was intriguing.  McCloud did a really good job of incorporating humor to keep me interested, he was able to relate many of the aspects of comics to what I’m used experiencing in reality, and I found that the way he relates the aspects of how I percieve art, pictures, and finally comics to many facets of my everday experiences.

I won’t necessarily say I’m going to be more interested in comics, and that I’m going to start reading them, but the way that McCloud conveys comics, and the way that he explains their complexity as well as their versatility and uniqueness makes me appreciate the artform quite a bit more than I had in the past.  I will no longer think of comics simply as superhero tales, but a more intricate art that incporates many many layers that I would have never considered had I not began this book.  I rarely say this, and though I don’t really consider this a textbook, this is one of the few readings that I have had that I really look forward to completing, which is saying quite a bit considering my prior disdain for both comics, and assigned readings.

As soon as I began to map out my book, I realized that the process would be more difficult that I initially anticipated.  The assignment seemed simple enough, and the reading material was quite simple as well, but the process of actually making the map was far more time consuming than I originally thought it would be.  The book was more complex than I had thought, and there were far more branches and paths than I ever imagined would be contained within 90 pages.  Reading through all of the paths and possible endings was  deceivingly difficult;  it was relatively hard to retrace all of the paths that were given to me throughout the book, which is not to say that the reading was hard at all, I was able to make it through all of the branches and endings in a fairly short period, but going back and documenting these paths was a far more tedious task than simply reading through.  I recall enjoying these choose your own adventure books when I was younger, but this assignment was something that I did not quite like.

The first time I went through My Boyfriend Came Back From the War, it really confused me, and I found it difficult to find a cohesive meaning in it.  After going through it a couple of times, I started to pick up a couple of different thought processes going through the narrator’s mind.  The first frame stays throughout the story, and is unchangeable, the second frame, as I take it, is the narrator, and clicking on it takes you into her mind and thoughts.  After this, the frames progressively split into many frames, some the same size, some differently sized.  Each original frame that splits carries one line of thought, then as it splits, delves deeper into what the narrator and her boyfriend are going through.  I believe the top middle frames are discussing the issues her boyfriend has with himself and his participation in the war, and his inability to deal with those issues.  The narrator is trying to talk to her boyfriend and help him move post these issues, I believe that he does not.

The frames in the bottom middle are much smaller and thinner than the rest of the frames, and the story line is shorter than the rest.  This storyline seems to delve into a discussion where the narrator is telling her boyfriend of an indescretion with another man.  I don’t quite get why the frames split at the end with no words, but I’m assuming that it’s something negative and not so good for the couple.  The frames in the top right corner seem to be the hollywood hopes of what the narrator wants to happen, but again it’s hard to decipher and really say what the author of this piece wants to get across.  At the bottom right is the author being content with the situation, there’s very little negativity, and at the end, if you click through all of the frames, the final frame is simply her name at the bottom right, and the picture that is constantly on the left side.  One interesting aspect of this piece, though I can’t say I’m sure why it is ther, is the fact that you can change the size of any of the frames.  Larger or smaller, or you can even push the frames away from sight; maybe there is meaning behind it, or maybe it is simply part of the programming, I thought it was kind of cool.