Twitter

Thursday, April 30, 2009

The Merits of a Graphic Novel

I never, ever really considered reading a graphic novel until...well...I started to read one.  This goes back to Fruits Basket again.  I watched the anime, but I was totally unsatisfied with the ending, so I decided to read the manga, even though I've never been into that (then again, to be fair, I've never been into anime until recently either).


[As an unrelated note, Fruits Basket is about a high school girl (Tohru Honda) who loses her mother and lives by herself in a tent in the woods until a boy in her class (Yuki Sohma) and his cousin (Shigure Sohma) find her and invite her to stay with them.  They are later joined by Kyo Sohma.  Tohru finds out that the Sohma family is under a curse and that some of the members are possessed by the animals of the Chinese zodiac.]

I'm not sure if it's just Fruits Basket or all manga/graphic novels in general, but characters' thoughts and motivations are so clearly shown.  It makes the reader really understand the character and makes the character three-dimensional and believable.

I already knew how important it is for characters to be realistic, but this made me realize how something simple like a character's thoughts and memories can make them real.  It's easier in a graphic novel because no matter how many different characters there are, thoughts can be written in first person.  I guess they can be like that in a traditional novel too, but in a traditional novel, it seems kind of gimmick-y.  In any case, it's still possible to include the characters thoughts, memories, etc. in and thanks to Fruits Basket, I realized I definitely need to do that in this project I'm currently working on.

So that's what I've started to do now.  I'll have to go back and fix what I already did before, but that'll happen when the time comes :)

0 comments: