To pick my pages I went through the methodical practice of randomly flipped through the books until I stumbled upon one that I remember intriguing me when I first read them. From the very first line of tracing I noticed how the panel boxes of Stitches were purposely not drawn perfectly. From then on I did slowly notice some new things about the specific panels. I think it was the slow process of tracing that allowed my mind to grappled with the design of the images better. One major realization for me was when I finished tracing and I looked at how different my Stitches tracing was from the original, and this was because my tracing did not have shadows. This annoyed me so much that I went back through my tracings and added shadows. For some reason the shadows of the scene added so much it felt like I would be misportraying the art if I didn’t include them, and this realization about the shadows ended up in part of my essay.
I found myself naturally thinking of the broad ways I was going to connect the two pages. I actually had an idea for a thesis but forced myself to ignore it and just start writing analytically about one of the pages. This was a hard process, but eventually I got it working. I had to do a lot of revisioning and cutting out because the only way for me to not think about writing to a conclusion was to just write as much analysis as I could. Even still the essay was still pretty long.
My biggest take away was from the analysis of how each author portrayed themselves as powerless. Their different styles influenced their respective scenes, but the way Walden presented hers in a minimalist style while Small presented his in an almost overdramtic lens really showed me how the same feeling can be captured by two different styles.
Isaac Gazmararian 