McCloud #2: Nowhere Girl

I read a blog entry about a comic called "Nowhere Girl." The comic outlines the life of a someone unusual girl who does not fit in with her friends and has suicidal tendancies. "Nowhere Girl" makes use of sharp images with adult themed back story dealing with suicide, acceptance and other topics. While I agree with Michal that the comic is a bit boring and whiny, it also talks about issues many unpopular people go through. Constant teasing, weird looks, and social awkardness is very common with geeks. Some people even label those different than them as a threat. Columbine and the VT shootings were blamed on video games and many other items. Ignoring sad people can be dangerous, but one little issue isn't it.

Scott McCloud wrote a book entitled Understanding Comics. In the book, McCloud outlines many techniques to create comics. While the book does not outline drawing comics, it does provide style guidelines to create the story, use imagery, and relate time and space to individual cells. Michal points out that "Nowhere Girl" is a word specific comic. The story can be told without the visual art, but I also feel the art adds mood to the work. The girl in the comic is very sad and drawn with black clothing. She is void of color when the world is often drawn with lots of color with right angles. She walks into an art show which is very vivid and the shapes are crisp. McCloud has an illustration of a man smoking a pipe with two wavy lines and states, "Despite their superficial resemblance, these are two very different sets of lines. One represents a visible phenomenon, smoke, while the other represents an invisible one, our sense of smell." (McClound 128) In "Nowhere Girl", I believe the meaning of right angles in most of the environments represents order. The girl is often drawn a little bit irregular showing her emotion. In the scenes with rain, the rain is often drawn at an angle and cloudy showing her feelings. The dialog in those sequences tends to relate her feelings with others feeling uncomfortable. The use of lines reinfornce the character's feelings without adding any additional information that is needed. The comic is much more powerful than a short story in plain text would have been. I don't think readers are supposed to like the story, but they should appreciate the artistic merit of the artist. The quality is similar to a modern "Amazing Spider-man" comic.