Assignment Prompt link / Response link Thesis: Tillie’s quiet stillness and reflective observation and David’s forced silence and confrontation both reveal the power of visual and textual interplay, but while one chooses silence and the other experiences it, this difference highlights how silence can be both self-imposed and enforced; therefore, Walden and Small use the graphic medium to transform repression into something visible and human. Preview: My essay compares how Tillie Walden and David Small use visual storytelling to show repression and silence between children and parents. Through color, gesture, and stillness, both authors make readers “stitch together” emotional meaning and see how fear and control shape communication. Reflection: Tracing and annotating the pages from Spinning and Stitches helped me slow down and notice the body language expressed in scenes with little to no dialogue. Redrawing each panel made me pay attention to how color, gesture, and space communicate feelings that words can’t always express. Writing the essay, with the thesis at the end, allowed my ideas to form naturally through close observation. This process helped me appreciate the subtle language of comics, specifically, how silence can hold meaning and emotion just as strongly as verbal words.

Both David Small’s Stitches and Tillie Walden’s Spinning use visual storytelling to examine the extent to which silence, repression, and fear characterize relationships between parents and children. Both authors combine text and illustration to show that pain is not always verbal — sometimes stillness, color, and silent motion convey the extent of the character’s pain. Tillie’s quiet stillness and reflective observation and David’s forced silence and confrontation both reveal the power of visual and textual interplay, but while one chooses silence and the other experiences it, this difference highlights how silence can be both self-imposed and enforced; therefore, Walden and Small use the graphic medium to transform repression into something visible, ethical, and deeply human. In Spinning, the page where Tillie witnesses two cars collide while waiting for her mom after her cello practice captures how she quietly internalizes fear and hides her emotions, while in Stitches, the page where David’s mother covers his mouth after he calls his grandmother “crazy” reveals how silence can be used as control. Both authors use different techniques, but they share a focus on how children learn to repress themselves in households ruled by tension. On the page from Spinning, Tillie waits for her mom outside after practice, sitting near a fence with her cello standing beside her (p 168). The scene feels quiet and uneventful until two cars randomly collide right in front of her. Walden fills the page with fragments of yellow light from the crash — a color that reflects on Tillie’s face and glows across the panels. Tillie doesn’t scream or run — she just stares. This reaction tells us that she has learned to remain still even in moments of fear. The yellow light, which dominates the panel, could symbolize exposure — a flash that forces her to face emotions she keeps hidden. The stillness and the reflective color show that her fear is inward, not outward. Walden turns this visual moment into a quiet metaphor for Tillie’s unspoken struggles, like her fear of coming out as a lesbian. Through muted reaction, soft lighting, and empty space, Walden communicates repression without needing to say it aloud. At the same time, in Stitches, David Small represents a different kind of silence, one that is forced. On the page where David calls his grandmother “crazy,” his mother reacts with sudden anger, covering his mouth and scolding him (p. 101-102). There is dialogue in this scene, but it is sharp and controlling, coming mostly from the mother. The images do more than repeat her words; they show how her authority dominates the space. The close-up of her hand over David’s mouth highlights that she controls both the conversation and his body movement. Unlike Tillie, who chooses silence as a way to stay safe, David’s silence is forced upon him. Through facial expressions and physical gestures, Small shows how parental power can turn communication into punishment. Both pages ask readers to do interpretive work. Walden never spells out Tillie’s emotions after the crash, and Small never directly states David’s internal reaction. Instead, the readers piece it together through visual clues; for example, the light on Tillie’s face, the tension in David’s eyes, and the way both scenes slow down time. This act of “stitching together” meaning makes readers active participants in understanding each child’s fear. Through color, space, and gesture, Walden and Small remind their audience that silence doesn’t mean emptiness — it means something powerful is being held back. Hillary Chute’s theory from “The Risk of Representation” helps explain why both authors rely on these visual strategies. She writes, “each text is anchored differently in traumatic history, each yet insists on the importance of innovative textual practice offered by the rich visual-verbal form of comics to be able to represent trauma productively and ethically. For this reason, graphic narrative, invested in the ethics of testimony, assumes what I think of as the risk of representation. The complex visualizing it undertakes suggests that we need to rethink the dominant tropes of unspeakability, invisibility, and inaudibility that have tended to characterize trauma theory as well as our current censorship-driven culture in general” (Chute 3). Chute’s idea of the “risk of representation” fits both pages perfectly. Walden and Small take emotional risks by using visual storytelling to depict trauma and repression in ways that feel intimate and vulnerable. They don’t hide silence — they draw it.
Chute, Hillary. “The Risk of Representation.” Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 3.

This is my backpack. I have some cuties and a leftover banana because I like to snack throughout the day. I also have my water bottle for water. I also have my computer and accordian folder to do and store work. I also have blue light glasses and a pencil to do work and not have my eyes hurt by the computer blue light. I also have a bunch of epi-pens for my peanut allergy in case I ever eat peanuts on accident.