This week we were required to read American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. I can honestly say that I have never read a graphic novel before this one. I have never had any interest in them and always thought it was a “boy” thing with superheroes and Batman and Superman and Spiderman, the list goes on and on. I was not particularly excited to read this graphic novel this week but when I opened it I tried to open my mind to it as well. This is what I discovered upon reading it. Graphic novels – if this one is any indication – can hold some really complex issues and present them in a quick , “easy” format that allows the reader to grasp the concept even if it is largely complex and would take hundreds of pages in a traditional novel. I have to give authors of graphic novels credit where credit is due in this sense because they are so limited to the amount of text on a page and specifically in each frame on that page. The combination of text and visuals is used to portray a lot of emotion which allows them to put into our minds what would take a thousand words to do – in this sense, a picture really is worth a thousand words.
Kaylin
Idea of graphic novels presenting complex issues to me is interesting. I found a lot of the things in American Born Chinese to be really simple. However, after discussing in class I realized how complex the meaning was behind them. I would never have grasped this meaning myself; it just seemed to simply go over me. This worries me, if complex issues are presented in such a simple way in graphic novels, are they effective? I personally think they are because I think that for many people, it is easy for them to interpret the message inside a graphic novel. These may be the same people that struggle to find the meaning inside a novel. With that in mind, I remind myself that graphic novels are not out to replace books, they are simply another way to represent information. If this other way gives certain people better access to certain ideas (or knowledge) I think it would mean that that media is indeed effective.
ReplyDelete---Amer Rasheed