My analysis starts from examining page 286 of Stitches and page 123 of Fun Home, leading to a comparison of rhetorical situations and stylistic elements employed in two works, finally reflected on the core of two traumatic experience: Alison investigated her own homosexuality and resolved trauma by empathizing with her father, yet David exhibited traumatic experience of horrid emotional abuse and medical gaze from childhood.
It’s a calm, appreciating experience to trace pages with pencils. By really imitating the contours, lines, and other details on the tracing paper, I could intimately feel the power and detail of images created by two talented drawers, and meanwhile come up with comparisons of their work and thus deeper understanding of their message, which helped a lot to form the thesis idea.
This is the first time for me to write an ABT thesis, or any essay that start from simple observations and proceed to a larger claim. However, I realized this isn’t the first time I read such text – the first-rate maths/science textbook would also start off from motivations and examples, then proceed to proofs of more generalized statements. This is indeed a rather reader-friendly, heuristic way to write an essay.
Apart from aforementioned stylistic observations, I also noticed more interesting facts about each work: Fun Home employed spiraling timeline, but Stitches used rather linear progression; on the thematic level, Alison empathized with her father’s sexuality and pressure laid by heterosexual normativity, but David voluntarily chose to forgive his parents after many years and trouble. These elements combined definitely tell the “secret language of comics” that hides below the surface drawing of the first sight.
Annotated Pages:
- https://zihaojinengrd.wordpress.com/2022/02/23/annoatated-page-1/
- https://zihaojinengrd.wordpress.com/2022/02/23/annotated-page-2/
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