Not All Fun and Games

This is a very interesting take on a memoir. I find that it really tells the story and allows the reader to "see" and feel the story. 

In many comic books the background is drawn to be realistic, this is to allow readers to step in and become part of the story. Bechdel used this technique and set the background with a shadowing of blue. This blue shadowing only intensified the realistic background for me. It is a seemingly inviting blue like she is asking and inviting the reader in to her childhood home and life; which is exactly what she is doing with this graphic novel.

  

 

At the beginning of the graphic novel is an image of her and her father engaging in a seemingly normal father daughter act of playing and ends with her jumping into a pool with her father. The images set the precedence that while her father was not perfect he was still her father first and foremost.

So, my take on this story is fairly straight forward. I sympathize with the author and her mixed feelings in relation to her interactions with her father. I have a similar sense of "Love you better from half a continent away" with my own mother and I really think that part of the reason that his tragicomic memoir continues to sell well is because most people feel this way about their own parents. Admittedly, my isues are significantly less tangled than Ms. Bechdel's, but so much of the story rings true that it becomes a voyeuristic exploration of another person's experiences. 

The father's emphasis on the importance of 'presenting a perfect family' in spite of the shaky framing of the actual familial relationships is an effective motivation for the evolution of the story. I especially enjoyed the use of subtle coloration in each image. In most of the images, the differences in what was colored and what was not made me think that the things that were left white were those that stood out more clearly in her memory while the images that were blue were those that were still shrouded to a certain extent by the loss of detail that happens in memory. 

In the image above, the father is rendered with no shading as are the alter boys and a few of the other church members. The reflection of memory has washed out some of the details, but the things she is pulling forward out oof her own memory as being significant are the clearest. Even the other church members that aren't a direct part of her realization about her father stand out. For me, this brought the notion home even more clearly. 

I know in my own exploration of my past, I've teased out details by filling in the background with details  that were less important. Like trying to remember what I did on my tenth birthday. I know the party was at a part and the air smelled like clover and our neighbor with the bright fake red hair was there, but those details aren't the central focus of my excavation of my own memory, but byproducts of it. For Ms. Bechdel, the background seems to serve a similar function, left in white because she found them, but certainly not the focus like the image of her father and the alter boys.

Again, the central image in each panel is left uncolored. In the lower two panels, the clothing is colored and makes me think that Ms. Bechdel remembered the 'type' of clothing but not the detail of patterning, choosing to leave that aspect of the memory undiscovered.