This assignment was definitely more challenging than the title makes it sound—sure the act of tracing the pages was easy but that was literally it. When I was thinking of what two pages to trace, I went through my bookmarked pages—there was pages I thought seemed important while I read along so I would bookmark them. The page I selected from Stitches was one I had bookmarked, however when I was going through my bookmarked pages in Spinning, I could not find one that seemed at first sight “easily comparable” to my chosen Stitches page, so I flipped through pages within the areas of bookmarked ones until I kind of decided to just do a “random” one. I traced and annotated my Stitches page first, feeling decently confident about the details I was noticing as I worked, then while my chosen Spinning page did not seem comparable at first sight, once I started tracing and adding annotations, I was noticing a few compositional things of comics’ secret language that were implemented in both pages but presented in different ways. This point of view was completely different than when I was reading the comics for the first time; the first reading, I was more focused on the storyline and while I obviously acknowledged the visuals, it wasn’t in this critical and analytical point of view.
I always have trouble writing “traditional” essays with the thesis sentence at the beginning because I usually don’t know what I’m even going to write about. And, while this format was supposed to be more helpful in the sense that you can just get started and not worry about the thesis statement until the end since it will be a synthesis of your main claims, I still did not really know what to write about/how to structure what I wanted to talk about. Additionally, thinking of how to word my thesis statement even at the end was still stressful. I think this process felt similarly stressful to writing other essays because even when I write in the “traditional” structure, I kind of make some weak thesis statement or skip it and just start writing, then return to it later… In the end, I made my thesis statement: David Small and Tillie Walden’s choices of flow, moment, and image work cooperatively to provide the reader with enough information to decode the narrative. While it may seem like the reader has not much other than the visual representations to rely on for decoding the meaning in these individual pages with minimal text, both Small and Walden set up these pages in a way that provides just enough information for the reader’s comprehension.
You can find my annotated traced pages along with my essay here.
