Week 5

This week, I studied Will Eisner's Life on Another Planet. 

What really struck me about this graphic novel was the style. The drawing quality strays away from the typical realistic comic style, and goes into a more exaggerated and expressive style. Eisner portrays the characters as caricatures, and focuses more on emphasizing their movement rather than having them stand stiffly while looking pretty (like a lot of characters in the action comics looked). The characters express emotion by using their entire body, which gives the drawings a very organic and convincing feel that pushes the drama levels extremely high.
For instance, toward the beginning of Life on Another Planet, the two main characters are caught eavesdropping by an antagonist, and they end up bashing his head with a rock. The movement in these sequential drawings are so clear and convincing, that it's difficult to not feel queasy after seeing it.
Also, this brings me to mentioning that the way that the characters are illustrated interacting together is so beautiful. There is sort of a cohesive motion to the characters in each drawing, and they way that Eisner illustrates this motion brings out the feeling in how the characters interact with each other. I think that seeing the relationship between two characters makes a drawing so much more interesting to look at since there's some sort of dynamic to be seen, and since his drawings are composed so heavily of character emotion and interaction, they're so much more interesting.

Something else I've noticed is that Will Eisner utilizes the space on each of the pages. He doesn't limit the drawings to single panels, but instead, takes advantage of any space given on the paper. More often than not, the drawings fall out of panels and almost flow into each other, and it's a beautiful thing to look at. It's as if each page is its own composition, holding an important, individual part to the story. This inconsistency of panel illustration also makes the graphic novel more engaging, since the actual layout of drawings on each page gives the reader's eyes a fresh sight every time.