The Bleak and the Surreal, and How the Two Tell Us So Much About the Works We Read
One of the most important aspects of graphic novels is the imagery that accompanies the dialogue. Without so much as using words, the images within the frames give us so much insight into the work that the dialogue simply could not provide. the importance of imagery is best shown in Delise’s Pyongyang especially when it is contrasted with David B.’s Epileptic.
In Pyongyang, the imagery is best described as bleak. The city is seen as a very bleak minimally populated place, and even the countryside is lacking a sort of vitality. The images within the frames seem to have been drawn with minimal detail and are all together not aestheticly pleasing. The images also seem to highlight the dreariness of Pyongyang that the author describes.
The art is done in grey-scale, which is interesting because grey is perhaps the least vibrant of colours and the author seemed to portray his time in Pyongyang as the least vibrant of cities. These images of greyscale also seem to underscore the loneliness that the author, a foreigner, felt in the capital city of this isolationist nation. The severe lack of detail exhibited by these illustrations almost makes the objects within the images seem lonely. Even in the midst of a crowd, each and every object, be it animate or not, seems to exude a type of loneliness, the type of loneliness that haunted the author throughout his stay in Pyongyang. The imagery in this work is constantly underscoring this insight into dreariness and loneliness. The imagery also stands in stark contrast to the imagery in “Epileptic.”
In Epilepticwe are constantly bombarded with images of the surreal. Almost from page one we are almost attacked by these intensely surreal images. The images are drawn with an incredible detail and are aesthetically pleasing. The images, drawn in black and white, provide a vitality to the frame as well as an insight into the various characters in the stories.
First and foremost the intense images can be seen as providing an insight into the author’s overactive boyhood imagination. This is highlighted not only by the intense detail and surreal in theillustrations but also in the incatracies of the drawings of the drawings he would do as a child. Examples of this can either be found in the massive battle scenes he drew as a boy, or in the scenes that are meant to be a glimpse into his imagination, such as how he pictures the stories his father told him at lunch time.
These images also provide an insight into the character traits of various characters in the story. For example the macro biotic alternative medicine practitioner that the authors family took his brother to see is drawn as being a large cat-human. This character is decribed as having a sort of gracefull vitality in his dealings with the authors family which matches his portrayal of a cat. However it can also be seen in the practitioners son who is portrayed as a much skinnier, shiftier cat. This also matches the way the author describes him, because he is descibed as having been a “playboy” and completely lacking the vitality that his father was brimming, this lack of vitality is also mirrored in the size of the practitioners son.
