Tag: first readers

Upon reading this graphic novel, I had no clue what to expect. My first reaction was to the use of bright colors and cartoonized characters. Despite the “semi-serious” subject of an unidentified body of a person who was killed in a bus station cafeteria bombing supposedly being the distant father of his distant son, Koby, I found the colors to be quite interesting to use because of the nature of this story. This graphic novel, I compared to WE3 in the ways that I felt as though I was actually viewing a movie. At one point I even had to shake my head and take a second look to remind myself that I was reading a book with pictures and not watching a film. I found this aspect quite entertaining however. I also thought the character of Koby was very developed and “real,” in a sense that he held nothing back in his emotions and you could actually relate him to a real person because of his sometimes indifference about his father’s whereabouts and safety. I also found the romance that grew between Koby and Numi very intriguing. Numi’s discovery that her thought-to-be deceased lover Gabriel (Koby’s father), had been having relations with other women during their “relationship,” pushed her into Koby’s arms because he was also used to his father disappointing him. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this story, more so after I found out Koby’s father was not killed in the bombing, but actually lived so that he could actually come to explain his actions or in-actions, to not only his son Koby, but also to Numi. I did hope that in the end Koby and Numi would have tracked down Gabriel together and come to terms together, but I finally understood the significance of the final scene in which Koby is stuck up a tree in Numi’s backyard after jumping the wall in attempts to tell Numi that he loved her, and how Numi tells Koby to jump and that she will catch him, and despite his crippling fear of jumping, he does. Koby lets his guard down, for once in a very long time.

Some of the formal aspects in We3 are very different from Nat Turner one being the full page “bleed” I think it was called. In We3 Grant Morrison seems to be upping the ante with the full page images, making them stretch onto two full pages instead of just one. The images (for example the guy who gets assassinated in chap 1) also have this extreme 3-D effect to them; they look like they are happening outside of the comic book. In the two page “bleed” where the guy in chapter one gets assassinated, the bullets obliterating his body actually look like they are coming from behind the audience into his pierced flesh. Or maybe not behind but it puts us in the eyes of the animal weapons (We3).
How Morrison achieved this effect stretched over two pages is an interesting topic to investigate. It looks like it would take some serious skills in perspective to draw or paint or computerize these massive 3-D images.
Finally, the power of these two page images is immense in the action category. When the reader turns the page and hits one of these panels, there is nothing else to look at besides this one moment. In a one page bleed, the reader has the other page to distract the eyes even if only for a moment. In other words, it takes less effort to focus on the intensity of the two pager because there is literally nothing else to look at.