Author: Fred

To the average reader, comics are thought of as bright, action-packed, colorful illustrations of superheroes or even mythical creatures. However, David Small’s Stitches and Tillie Walden’s Spinning flip this directive by using comics to depict their traumatic childhoods and how they found their identity inside of it. Stitches and Spinning both use shading to depict emotion without words, but Stitches has a rougher and more unconventional style, while Spinning is more refined and organized. Therefore, the comparison between the two reveals how an author’s shading style reflects a different way of handling emotion. Without using words or description, both David and Tillie reveal the emotion they are feeling through the use of shading. In both narratives, the authors use shading across facial expressions to depict emotion. In each close-up, David and Tillie have parts of their faces unshaded and shaded. This partial shading causes the face to be split up, allowing the reader to focus on multiple parts of the face rather than one part. In the two traced pages, the characters’ main facial expressions are inside of the shading, highlighting the main emotion the two are experiencing and making the emotions more immediate. With the partial shading in close-ups, the two writers transform tiny, quiet moments into intense, imagined portrayals of the characters’ inner lives. David and Tillie have different shading styles in their narratives. David’s is rougher, while Tillie has a more refined shading style. David’s shading can be seen purposefully seeping through frames into the gutters or margins. This may reveal David’s lack of control over his emotions in comparison to Tillie. Tillie’s refined style shows how she realizes the emotions are wrong, but controllable. When the shading from Tillie’s face vanishes versus David’s shading consuming him, it reveals how Tillie can mask her emotions while David struggles with it and finds a way to distract himself with his stuffed animal and imagination. The comparison between the two authors’ shading reflects how the authors experience and process memories differently from one another. The fact that the authors both use shading to portray emotion but use different styles mirrors the uncontrollable aspect David feels and Tillie’s retrospective processing of her emotions. The shading overwhelms David just as his emotions did, while the shading on Tillie disappears due to her suppressing her emotions and controlling her current situation. Comics allow the author to reveal these emotions through creative and subtle ways such as shading, while textual narratives have to take a more direct route. Hillary Chute expands on this idea in Graphic Women by writing, “graphic narrative moves beyond prescriptive models of alterity or sexual difference. And in every case, graphic narrative presents a traumatic side of history, but all these authors refuse to show it through the lens of unspeakability or invisibility” (Chute 25). By referencing a “lens of unspeakability,” Chute refers to not specifically describing the emotions felt and instead depicting it with images. This is seen with the use of shading in both Tillie and David’s works. The use of shading and different styles in both works portrays the contrast of emotions and how comics are used to display this. The way the authors portray these emotions may be factored by the timing that they worked on the narratives. Tillie’s experiences in Spinning were much more recent, while David’s experiences were much further away. David was able to reflect more on his experiences than Tillie, possibly factoring how he depicted his shading style to show the consumption of emotions, while Tillie’s shading reflects her attempt to process and regulate her feelings in the moment. Both authors were allowed the creativity to show these emotions in unique ways because of the creative freedom of comics.