Blog post, week 2

Since we didn’t get a chance to look over the ‘Nat Turner’ graphic novel piece by Kyle Baker in class, I thought it would merit a look on the blog. I found his style to be very noteworthy. The piece is visual in the simplest sense of the word; the varying shades and texture of his artistic images are the bulk of the story; sound effects are minimal. I read the novel for class earlier in the week, then went back before writing my post. During my second glance, I was surprised by how few words there were; my memory from the first read through had filled in a myriad of sounds and interactions that were only glances and faces on the page. The minimal pre-formed words and exchanges leave a great deal of room for personal extrapolation of the interactions on the page. The reader can insert exchanges for each glance and thoughts for every expression. The visual use of line and shading is also another device employed by Baker. I noticed that entrance of the gun wielding Europeans is a sharply lined, faceless entrance with a frame crowded by pounding hooves. This builds terror as much as any menacing words might. As much as the faces of the European captors are hidden, becoming all the more terrifying when kept from the light, the faces of the Africans they came to kidnap are vividly portrayed. The emotions shown are powerful and dynamic, at odds with their captors, whose only appearance as showing emotion is in dragging back the taken from attempts at suicide. Another frame that I found striking, was the sharks below the ship’s hull at the birth of the baby. The thin wooden planks are all that separated the belly of the ship and its human cargo from the black ocean and the creatures outside of it. This paralleled, for me, the mother’s womb and the child; she was all that protected the child from the ‘sharks’ that circled around it. I thought this piece was very different from what we had examined so far, and was fascinated by this interesting contribution to the literature