I found Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics to be an incredibly informative and eye-opening look at the nature and history of comics, and when it came time to make a post I was having difficulty narrowing down one of his many topics to discuss. However, a point he made on page 85 stuck with me: "The art of comics is as subtractive as it is additive." He illustrates this idea with one story told in four different editions, each one with fewer panels than the one before it. McCloud explains how finding the balance between too much and too little is one of the most difficult tasks that comics creators face. This led me to realize just how minimalistic comics actually are, despite their appearance. It is easy to be overwhelmed by this art form, as I think most of us experienced while reading Heartbreak Soup. There is an enormous amount to take in at once, not just with the pictures and text, but the all important panel space that forces the readers to draw their own conclusions. But can you imagine how much Gilbert Hernandez must have edited out before he arrived at his final draft? He managed to achieve the perfect balance between how much story to provide and how much to leave up to the readers' imaginations.
Gene Yang took a different approach with American Born Chinese. He did not give us as much character history as Hernandez, but he provided just about all of the plot that we needed. For instance, we do not see how Wei-Chen evolved from the shy Asian transfer student that we saw at the beginning of ABC into the extremely bold and Americanized character he is in the last chapter. However, we know exactly where he and Jin stand at the end of the novel; Yang leaves it up to the reader to imagine how they reached this place and where they will go from here.
These are just two ways that comics creators achieve the balance between too much and too little information. It will be interesting to see the other ways this balance is reached in the rest of the books we read this semester.
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Caitlyn, this post dovetails nicely with your comment to Katlyn Massimino's post about "Applying the Concept of Closure to Heartbreak Soup." It's worth considering minimalism in a variety of contexts, too--not only with respect to closure (in the limited sense of juncture between panels or in the wider sense of how much story is included in a narrative) but also with respect to matters of rendering (how realistic is a given artist's work? Is black and white preferable to color? etc.). On that note, I think of the artist David Mazzucchelli, whose work we'll see in the graphic-novel adaptation of _City of Glass_. It's a much more stripped-down style than what he used to produce back in his Marvel comics days. And the reasons for that reduction (or at least the effects thereof) are worth pondering.
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