March Vol 1 (2 points)

 For this week’s reading of March, I was actually pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it, or possibly how fast my reading of it seemed to flow. With a lot of nonfiction works I often find myself being a little bored or distracted at times, but this one did a nice job capturing my attention though I guess I could also attribute it to the fact that it was in a graphic novel format. I acknowledge that these were true past events but I guess now more than ever it did strike a little harder with everything that is going around with current social issues and protests. In terms of visuals, I thought it did a great job in keeping interest through the variation of full-page illustrations, comic box format, and text spreads. If these events were played out using only a simple comic box method I don’t think it would translate the mood as accurately, which is another thing I think really helped improve the overall tone of this book. For nonfiction especially, I can understand how difficult it might be to try and depict these events in an accurate yet interesting way, especially if you yourself were not there to witness it firsthand. Taking from limited references as to how and where these events were laid out is a completely different task through the perspective of a comic creator rather than a documenter who can just as simply write all of this all out as a statistic. The feeling and emotion the author/artist was able to create with pictures, dialogue, and composition were very telling in this novel, and I could tell it was very thought out. I found myself particularly drawn to the full-page illustrations that varied from showing one or two main focal points, or even just a small body of text. I saw for a lot of these the page was filled with full ink and/or a small body of text, giving it a hauntingly lonely feeling to it. And since the eye is generally drawn to areas of contrast, it really helped bump the feeling of the story in certain parts.