'Dark Country' by Tab Murphy

'Dark Country ' is a comic based on a short story by Tab Murphy. A man is travelling through the desert at night with his new wife, when they encounter a dead man, who haunts them throughout the book.
 Murphy also wrote a screenplay by the same name. The short story and information about the film are included in the back matter of this comic, allowing the reader  to see how the story has been translated into each of these mediums.There are a number of differences in the telling of the story in these differing forms. This is a great example of the importance of inclusion and exclusion- Scott McCloud discusses this in his book, Understanding Comics. He explains that what one leaves in or out of comics has an effect of the overall perception of the story. This can be seen through what is included and excluded in the three different mediums this story has been told using.The short story, for example, gives a lot more background details to the story that the comic does not convey, and the comic has a much more simplified storyline. The short story features dialogue, whereas the comic is completely silent. The short story has a narrator,  placing the reader in the role of the main character, calling him or her 'you', whereas the comic presents the main character visually as separate from the reader, as if he or she were watching him and his wife's adventures from nearby.
Indeed, Duncan and Smith theorize that authorship and the act of creating are reductive, as the author , as McCloud discusses, has many choices about what material to include and what to leave out, since every detail of the story cannot be conveyed. McCloud discusses the effects that leaving certain elements in or out of a comic can have on a reader's impression of the story. As we have seen, the best way to tell a story can sometimes vary, depending on medium. Duncan and Smith theorize that while the creation process is reductive, the act of reading comics is additive, as the reader has an active role in the meaning making of the work. He or she must 'fill in the gaps', as they go through, such as the space between panels, called the gutter. Different transitions of panels in time and subject matter demand reader involvement to understand what is happening in the story. In this particular comic, no narration is given whatsoever, so the reader must work even harder to put the images together into one cohesive whole.
Douglas Wolk discusses the effect of drawing and line style on the reader's interpretation- The line style is clean, yet almost 'furry', allowing for a lot of texture and shading. This emphasizes the drama and horror of the piece in doing so as dramatic lights and darks are emphasized within the black and white palate. this gives the comic a spooky, ominous, horrific mood, and suspense is slowly built up throughout the work.
Dylan Horrocks discusses multimodality in comics in his article "Inventing Comics;Scott McCloud Defines the Form in Understanding Comics" and one can see that different mediums are combined in this comic- the panels are horizontal and landscape- oriented, mimicking the widescreen view of films.
This form, however, despite its similarities to it, is not exactly like film- Ian Hague, in his article " Eyes Like Comic, Or, ocularcentrism in Comics Scholarship" points out the fact that the material form of a piece affects how a work is read. Indeed, unlike film, each image of a comic has to be reprinted on a separate panel. In film, images are displayed one replacing another. A comic's panels are laid out on a page, and the reader must decide which order to read them in. The reader is more active, as we have seen, in the case of comics. Here, however, the order is fairly straightforward and, because anyone familiar with reading western comics can draw on the convention of reading them left-to right, would quickly be able to determine this order, as Anne Magnussen discusses in the article "The Semiotics of C.S. Pierce as a Theoretical Framework for the Understanding of Comics". Magnussen , as well as McCloud in his own work, explain that readers are able to understand comics because they are familiar with the conventions that tehy employ, such as reading right-to left. Other comics, unlike this one, can be far more ambiguous as to the correct reading order, sometimes purposely so, and reading panels in a different order would have a different impact on the reader and the meaning that he or she drew away from it, as Jesse Cohn discusses in his article "Mise-En-Page:A Vocabulary Of Page Layouts". In film, by contrast,as we have discussed in class, the viewer has no choice in which 'path' to take- he or she is presented with the images in the correct order the creator wants them to be viewed in, allowing the creator more control and the viewer far less. As a result, the film-viewing experience is far more passive than comic reading.

This page (to the upper left) is an example of what Scott McCloud calls an aspect -to aspect panel transition. Aspect to Aspect transitions are ones in which the panels depict different aspects of a scene- on this page, the first shows the headlights of the car. the second, the main characters. the third, a closeup of the key in the ignition and the keychain attached to it, and so on. It does not focus on the two characters in a moment to moment transition, such as other pages do. (see above). This demonstrates  that more than one type of panel transition are possible within the same work.

The comic adapts the original short story in a number of ways- for example, it emphasizes, through visuals, the keychain with the words 'love' and 'never forget me'-mom' on it to convey a detail of the original story expressed in words- the main character is taking his new wife to meet his mother for the first time, and worries whether she will approve. Since, due to the silent nature of the comic, this cannot be said outright, it is hinted at by the many returns to and emphasis on the keychain, which serves to symbolize this detail in the story. As a result, the reader does not  necessarily know the specific fact that they are going to see the mother, but it suggests some kind of connection to her through this visual reference. Since the meaning of the reference is not said outright, it is somewhat unclear and ambiguous, and, again, the reader must be more active in trying to decipher what meaning this has to the story.

Though short, this comic was an interesting read and it was interesting to compare the different mediums used in telling this story.

Works Cited

Cohn, Jesse."Mise-En-Page:A Vocabulary of Page Layouts."Teaching the Graphic Novel. Ed.Stephen E. tabachnick.New York:Modern Language Association, 2009.44-57.

Duncan, Randy and Matthew J. Smith. "Experiencing the Story." The Power of Comics: History, Form, and Culture.New York: Continuum, 2009.153-70.

Hague, Ian. "Eyes Like Comics, or, Ocularcentrism in Comics Scholarship."Comics and the Senses:A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels.London:Routledge,2014. 9-33.

Horrocks,Dylan."Inventing Comics;Scott McCloud Defines the Form in Understanding Comics."The Comics Journal #234 (June 2011):29-52

Magnussen, Anne.”The Semiotics of C.S. Pierce as a Theoretical Framework for the

Understanding of Comics.” Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Eds. Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christensen. Copenhagen:

Museum Tusculanum P, 2000.193-207.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.

Thompson, Craig. Goodbye, Chunky Rice. 5^Th ed. Toronto: Random House of Canada, Limited., 2004.

20-21. Print.

Wolk, Douglas. “Pictures, Words, and the Space Between Them.” Reading Comics. New

York: Da Capo Press, 2007. 118-34