My Dead Girlfriend by Eric Wright Vol 1

This comic stars Finney, a teenage boy living in a town full of monsters, witches, and ghosts. His family has a long history of having strange, epic deaths that overshadow their lives. After he meets a girl, Jenny, at the local fair and bonds with her over their common love of bad carnival rides, they plan to meet again the next day. But Jenny doesn't show, and Finney feels discouraged. At the end of this issue, he discovers that since they last met, Jenny has died, and is now a ghost, complicating their budding relationship.

Duncan and Smith, in their article "Experiencing The Story", discuss the importance of paratexts (such as covers, title pages, and other things that are not part of the comic itself, yet are included with it) in setting up expectations in the reader about the comic. For example, this comic's title foreshadows Jenny's death; before she dies, the reader is expecting her to die or to be revealed as a ghost because of it.
The back of the book includes rough work of Wright's when he was designing the characters. Though not technically a part of the comic itself, this comic helps the reader realize the comic as a constructed object. this is what Matthew Jones, in his article entitled "Reflexivity In Comic Art" calls reflexivity. he outlines five distinct forms of reflexivity, one of which is demystification; the act of revealing the mechanisms of the comic-making process, thereby revealing its constructed nature. these rough sketches can be seen as an example of such demystification, since they expose Wright's process in creating the characters.

Wright uses different lettering and coloring for different characters speaking.This is used to convey something of how the character's voice sounds, for example, different fonts are used for different characters, and the ghosts in the story have speech bubbles that are transparent, suggesting thinner, ghostlier voices than the other characters in the books. Douglas Wolk, in his article "Pictures,Words, and the Space Between Them" points out that one cannot really create sound in a comic, only suggest it- in fact, the entire comic itself is a construction, as   discusses. David Carrier discusses , in "The Speech Baloon; Or, The Problem of Representing Other Minds", the fact that word baloons are not transparent vessels for meaning, but, rather, affect reader interpretation. Indeed, nothing in a comic is. every choice a creator makes affects the reader's understanding and meaning-making.


Scott McCloud, in his book, Understanding Comics, discusses the idea of closure- the act of 'filling in the blanks' of an idea from the images provided. This comic has many panels that show only part of the action that is going on in the scene. Through the process of closure, the reader understands, through these fragmented images, what is going on.

McCloud also discusses the various transitions in time in comics, outlining a  number of them. Wright uses a number of these, including what mcCloud calls  a moment to moment transition; this is a type of panel transition that shows each moment in the comic. Other transitions include aspect to aspect, in which panels witch from different aspects or objects in a scene.

Works Cited

Carrier, David."the Speech Baloon; or, The Problem of Representing Other Minds." The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park, PA; Pennysylvania State University Press, 2000.27-45

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.

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

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

York: Da Capo Press, 2007. 118-34