Yes, it is somewhat of a puzzle. This is because I’m attempting to tell a story without using any words at all.

What you read is close to how I intended it, but not exactly. However, I thank you for your comment, as it gives me input into how I might communicate my ideas better.

Thanks,

-Josh

I choose to laugh because the alternative invites despair instead of resolution.

Your thought about using silhouettes is interesting, and something that I had not considered. I am using shapes mostly because it allows me to easily show groups and different characters. I had never once considered that people wouldn’t consider them as characters. That may be a reflection as to how I think.

They are not intended to convey humor, but to explore an issue. I am being deliberately vague as to the specific issue I am exploring, as these can be highly divisive issues, and I don’t want the comments/discussion to become personal. I’m more interested in an intellectual exploration of aspects of our culture. That said, it’s been interesting how some people find them hilarious and others find them poignant.

I would be VERY interested in comments about how others interpret the comics. Once others have shared to a critical point, I would be comfortable sharing my original intent. I just don’t want my words to impact how others view the comic, so I want them to go first.

I have read Scott McCloud’s “Making Comics”, and it probably inspired some of what I am doing here. The rest was inspired by the stupidly polarized political discussions that occurred here in Iowa prior to the primaries, and my resulting anger with the candidates for refusing to directly discuss the issues.

So you may want to read my comments in the context of my handicap and my professional interest.

You’ve done a good job with your visual vocabulary. As I’d have predicted, it takes a few “episodes” to fully establish it. Since I started with this Jan 6 episode, I wasn’t sure whether all avatars would have cigarettes (I could hypothesize that you included them so I’d know those were people, not thiings). After looking at the other episodes, I now know this one is actually about smoking (the ashtray should’ve been a hint), but I still don’t get its story. It would help if I was sure what “!” meant.

I especially love the way you portrayed fighting in an earlier episode. It has just enough resonance with the emotional reality of fighting.

By comparison, I don’t emotionally identify with the geometric shapes, and I have to work at knowing they are people. At some vague level, I feel like their color and shape isn’t arbitrary — that I’m supposed to know something about their roles from those attributes. Am I too verbal… or too visual? This difficulty reminds me of a friend who said that in childhood he felt the digits (1, 2, … 0) all had color and personalities. It made it hard for him to learn basic arithmetic, because the answer to 3 + 7 involved the participants’ motivations! It might have been a form of synesthesia.

Some of the other things that may be getting between me and the meaning:

** The use of typography symbols means, of course, that the images are language-dependent (maybe not English, but users of our alphabet).

** Some of the symbols are only meaningful to consumers of “comics.” In particular, I noticed the speech balloons, the cloud above, even the fight. All of these probably depend on a specific visual vocabulary — one that we acquire young (looking at the funny pages, etc). I’d be fascinated to show your “strips” to people from a non-Western culture. My experience with testing of web app usability: we’d start with some predictions about which UI aspects were obvious and which were obscure. We were only about 70% right on both fronts. Really interesting.

** I’m a lazy looker. In the episode that started with churches, there was too much going on in the first coupla frames.I wasn’t yet used to the avatars, so I couldn’t get the overall message of “church service” at a glance. I ended up moving on without full comprehension, and then going back. I probably would not have had this difficulty if either (a) I’d looked at many episodes and gotten used to the avatars, or (b) you used people silhouettes so that I could use visual pattern matching to recognize the scene, instead of having to analyze it, verbally, in chunks.

If your “strips” are supposed to relate to humor, I’m really at sea. The ones I thought I could narrate didn’t seem funny. But if they’re an experiment in visual communication, bring it on!

You should share your efforts with Scott McCloud (he has a web site). I assume you’ve read his “Understanding Comics” — if not, you are in for a treat! I love what he has to say about abstracting concepts (very relevant to icon design). There’s also Will Eisner’s “Sequential Art.” They are both insightful about the action that “happens” between the frames, and from that they can talk about pacing in the storytelling.

I’d like to see a link where we can “peek” and see if our interpretation of the story matches your intent.

http://www.raproject.com/wordpress/wp-ajax-edit-comments/ and http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/live-comment-preview/

I am also using some anti-spam plugins to (hopefully) keep things clean.