Tracing these two pages was a fun process for me. I’ve never had an assignment that required me to both draw and write for an analysis, but the tracing-pages task gave me that chance. Drawing the pages first—rather than just taking screenshots and writing—made me think more comprehensively. It almost worked as planning: I could see the details for myself not only by looking at the page, but also by re-creating it.
I did something similar for a few essays in high school, but it was sometimes hard to follow consistently. Writing with an ABT thesis at the end actually makes my essay more engaging than simply comparing the pages paragraph by paragraph. I wrote my thesis first and then drafted the introduction, because I believe doing so makes the essay more fluent and easier to understand.
By tracing these two pages, I noticed details I had missed before. In Spinning, I hadn’t realized how the scene of Tillie sitting on the floor uses a camera-like language: the pair of skates emphasizes her detachment. She isn’t understood by her friends or even by her family. The whole page shows Tillie’s inner state—both detached and disconnected.
Invisible Wounds
Tracing these two pages was a fun process for me. I’ve never had an assignment that required me to both draw and write for an analysis, but the tracing-pages task gave me that chance. Drawing the pages first—rather than just taking screenshots and writing—made me think more comprehensively. It almost worked as planning: I could see the details for myself not only by looking at the page, but also by re-creating it.
I did something similar for a few essays in high school, but it was sometimes hard to follow consistently. Writing with an ABT thesis at the end actually makes my essay more engaging than simply comparing the pages paragraph by paragraph. I wrote my thesis first and then drafted the introduction, because I believe doing so makes the essay more fluent and easier to understand.
By tracing these two pages, I noticed details I had missed before. In Spinning, I hadn’t realized how the scene of Tillie sitting on the floor uses a camera-like language: the pair of skates emphasizes her detachment. She isn’t understood by her friends or even by her family. The whole page shows Tillie’s inner state—both detached and disconnected.
Invisible Wounds
I actually had the most trouble finding the pages I wanted to trace. I am not the best artist, so I was searching for something simple that could also convey a main idea. Actually tracing and annotating the pages was relatively easy as it was mostly just common sense. While tracing though, I was able to understand the page better as I had to re-create, with my own hands, every single detail. While this ABT structure was very foreign to me, I was able to incorporate it with my past style of writing. I still created a thesis in that rough format, but it was not exactly ABT but a little more jumbled. I did feel like this assignment helped with understanding the comic’s secret language, as beforehand, I had never paid attention to how much a color scheme could impact my mood of the story. This allowed me to understand the stories a lot better.
In the traced pages, Tille and David are both depicted as being alone, with David laying on the ground drawing and Tillie sitting alone, watching skaters from the sideline. And while they are not by themselves in a literal sense, they are both alone essentially. In David’s situation specifically, he is drawing with his mom in the kitchen in the other room, washing dishes and not paying much attention to him. While this may not seem like a lot on the surface, it portrays an underlying theme of neglect and isolation present throughout Stitches. This situation where David is alone repeats throughout, not because he has no friends, but due to the fact that he is neglected by his parents, raised in a household that does not love him. In Tillie’s similar situation, she had just moved to a new state and was trying to adapt to her new lifestyle with her new team. Because of this, she felt isolated/neglected, just as David did.
While they are both alone in the end, their situations and attitudes prove to be drastically different as Stitches and Spinning both give off completely different vibes. This difference can be observed, not just in the pages chosen, but throughout the entire story, where David’s facial expressions often exhibit resentment and anger while Tillie’s show admiration and curiosity. To add on to this difference in tones presented between the stories, Stitches’ color scheme also stays much closer to a black and tan palette to help convey to the reader the feeling of claustrophobic isolation that David faces. On the other hand, Spinning is more bright, showcasing a more cool color theme with a variety of blue and white colors to establish a calming presence that she learns to use to find herself. While these differences are just a few of the numerous others present in the two comics, they all serve the similar purpose of establishing their distinct and unique tones.
Ultimately, while both books show a main character isolated and neglected from their surroundings, Small uses a more neutral color scheme and facial expressions to convey this idea, whereas Walden emphasizes a more bright color scheme and facial expressions. In conclusion, this shows that comics can be diverse, used as a medium to represent a variety of core ideas and themes. In this case, two separate comics held similar themes of isolation, but presented them in almost emotionally opposite ways.
Difference in facial expressions as mentioned in paragraph 2:
When creating my quadriptych comic, I wanted time to move in between the frames. It was challenging to draw the golf club because I could not picture one clearly in my head. This is similar to the triptych because they are both short stories. I think by stretching the middle and adding another panel, a lot more possibilities opened up versus the triptych. I enjoyed making the quadriptych more than the triptych due to the opened middle panels. I told the story of a broken golf club because I recently broke my friend’s golf club on accident.
