Little Nemo in Sumberland, by Winsor McCay

Little Nemo in Slumberland is so goddamn good. Krazy Kat is great too. I absolutely adore how these pieces shattered my expectation of comic strips or what I've always known as "the funnies". These strips don't just go for the gag, they don't just use some clever word play to give the audience a quick jolt, but rather give the reader an experience. The massive Little Nemo prints are beautifully done, and bring the viewer to another world where anything can happen. Winsor McCay's strip is successful in immersing me as a reader because of it's wonderfully surreal art nouveau inspired images that evokes memories of my own adventures through dreams. I can only imagine reading one of these strips in a pre-Harryhausen world where movie monsters and cgi did not exist. I think the common thread between Krazy Kat and Little Nemo is a sense of depth that I feel strips in the Sunday paper of today lack. The punch lines of these two strips seem more varied and complex than that of the 1, 2, 3, punch of comics today. Krazy Kat was a strip that didn't shy away from having a somber human moment as its "punch line" and Little Nemo seems to have rarely had a gag at all, but instead relied on subtle mysterious stories that people could immerse themselves in. I also personally like how we can see within Krazy Kat and Little Nemo the experimentation and human hand within each work. You can tell that these artists truly loved what they did and really expressed their own feelings and thoughts through their historic work.

The Rooster's Laughter by Max Ernst

"The Rooster's Laughter" is a series of surreal collages made up of images from victorian novels and encyclopedias. The series features a cast of bird headed men displaying strange and often violent behavior. I think that Ernst's work is fascinating, because it explicitly uses icons and imagery to send a message to the viewer. There is something about the idea of taking images from sources like encyclopedias and novels and using their existing meaning in a new way that draws me to this work. While Shaun Tan leveraged the readers personal experience in his work, Ernst seems to thrive off of peoples existing perception of icons and imagery. Ernst understands how people perceive certain images such as the rooster and intentionally gives a new role to these images. Tan seems to bring the reader in by creating familiar situations that are relatable while Ernst uses familiar imagery in a darker light to shock the viewer. In my opinion "The Rooster's Laughter" ultimately shows how the human mind can manipulate imagery and data. In the dream like world that Ernst establishes, all things are susceptible to being twisted to the horrific will of the artist. The effect of Ernst's work reminds me of nightmares in which something that might usually be harmless, like a clown, is given much darker motivations and becomes a much more disturbing experience due to the ordinarily innocent nature of the subject. If Ernst just depicted normal men whipping women and hanging one another then the viewer, having a preexisting understanding of man's violent nature, might not be as shocked as they would to see the normally docile rooster doing such things.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

The Arrival is a silent graphic novel (is every book silent because it contains no audio or is reading in itself some sort of audio? I dunno man) that depicts the journey of an immigrant and his family to a new and strange world in which author, Shaun Tan uses symbols, facial expressions, and brilliant world building to tell the story as opposed to words. In The Arrival we see Tan's ability to manipulate the readers feelings. The story does not lay out on the table "THIS IS AN IMMIGRATION STORY, IT IS ABOUT MY GRANDPA GOING TO ELLIS ISLAND", but instead using surreal imagery and architecture to alienate the reader and make the reader FEEL like an immigrant as opposed to just telling the reader how immigrants might have felt going to a new place. We as the reader do not know the language of this new place and are as confused at times as the character that we are following throughout the novel. This manipulation of the reader gives us a direct connection with the main character because we are going through the story with the character as opposed to watching the character from an omnipotent point of view like you might if you read a book about an immigrant going through Ellis Island when you might already know the history of immigration at Ellis Island. Shaun Tan's immersive story telling is something I would like to implement into gaming. The concept of immersion is huge in video games and with the innovation of virtual reality, the game industry is working towards making more immersive experiences, but I think with more analysis of stories like The Arrival one could learn how to more directly immerse the player into a story.