Revision of a Blog Post

After reading the theories of Will Eisner and his concept of comic illustrations and their sense of movement, emotion, and storytelling through what looks like frozen action frames in an animation, I also see the similarities in Craig Thompson's works as well. Both of them have a firm and complex understanding of what a character can imply through a single frame of movement, and what kind of feelings you can get, expect, and even watch them do. You mind seems to fill in the gaps with movement to each of the still frames, and in your mind you can take what you're seeing and affix a feeling towards even little things like how pushed up someone's shoulders are to show uncomfortability or anger for instance. To reference their theories in action, I looked over Eisner's Contract With God and Thompson's Blankets.

To start off, let's look at the similarities. Visually and literally, both of the works are in black and white with no color. Both of the art styles remain concise and constant throughout the stories, and the use of dynamic poses is very prevalent. Both of the artists display a strong atmospheric feeling of an overarching heavy problem in both the characters, world, and story, and they also accomplish an end result of how the characters deal with this, regardless of positive or negative outcome. To look at the opposites, one can see that Thompson's style is more of a stylized form of characterization, sometimes jumping to abstract representational images, or semi-realistic single frames, whereas Eisner's style is very realistic, with consistent rendering styles and use of purely representational promotion of character attitude, feelings, and the like (example would be the multiple head shots in sequential order in The Super). Another trait that puts Eisner's work from Thompson's is the rooted city-life society and down-to-earth problems these characters have, whereas Thompson's work focuses more on the singular person and the abstract forms of their internal and external conflicts with another person, rather than a society. Overall, I feel like that visually, they agreed on the idea of knowing and understanding things these characters do, feel, and act with dynamic looks, but both accomplish their own feats separately as a deviation of their main theory.