I Laika Lot

Sorry for ripping off your wordplay there Lee, but I must say, there is something about this book that really excites me. I don’t know what it is exactly but I feel like I could talk about it for days; fortunately we got some time in class for me to spill some of the thoughts that were literally begging to be spoken. I still feel like I have a ton to say however, so I’ll try to use this forum to get some more of it out.

First of all, there are a few more minor things I wanted to mention about color that I didn’t get to say in class. Specifically, I wanted to talk some more about color’s usefulness in displaying emotion and some more ways that that was depicted. Lisa and I talked a lot about Abadzis’ use of primary colors to display emotion: the contrast of red and blue, black and white, yellow. But we didn’t really touch on some of the secondary colors used in the book. Perhaps that was a good thing because I think we both felt like our grasp on his intentions when using those colors was pretty loose.

The first color I wanted to address was green. I wasn’t really sure what it meant, but Lisa and I both noticed that many times it made an appearance during times of calm, escape, or almost safety (however fleeting the moment may be). This can be seen on pages 69-75, where Kudryavka is first introduced to Yelena, in some of the (possibly romantic?) exchanges between Yelena and Oleg Georgivitch, on pages 141-142, where Dr. Yazdovsky offers to take Kudryavka home to meet his kids, and also in the moments where Yelena is in the park with her friends. Green is also seen in the sweater worn by Tatiana.

Another complex color used in this book is purple. This color shows up pretty much randomly throughout most of the novel until it makes a major appearance on pages 158-163. In this section, Yelena is preparing Laika for her upcoming space travel and seems to have adopted an attitude of resignation and cynicism. She is deeply sad, but does not hesitate to snap back at her superiors with snarky remarks. This mixed bag of emotions, I feel, can be connected to purple in that purple can be thought of as a mix of red and blue. What she is feeling is a combination of intense sadness (characterized in this book by the color blue) and a fiery anger (characterized by the color red). The result is a complex jumble of feelings and a purple hue. Again I could be way off here but I just wanted to put my best guess out there.

I also wanted to mention a bit about panel count in this book. Reading McCloud, I feel like I am more equipped to notice the subtleties of panels, spying out how they flow through the book and what they can do and signify. With that said, what stood out most for me was Abadzis’ positioning of panels to moderate the pace of the story. According to McCloud, moment-to-moment transitions can often slow down the tempo of a comic, giving off an almost slow-motion quality. Abadzis counteracts that effect (most notably on pages 41-42) by overlapping the panels and even having them gradually slope upward or downward as the reader progresses. By using this technique, I felt he was able to keep pages with many panels (of which there are many) from feeling long and drawn out. Also by doing this consistently throughout the novel, he creates moments of pause and contemplation whenever he broke away from the norm with simplicity and minimalism (130-132, 185-186, 198-199)

Returning to color, as I conclude, I wanted to quickly address an area of confusion for Lisa and me when we were studying the book for its use of color. Try as we might, we could not settle on a good explanation for the flurry of colors in the background of the panels on page 138. Gray, green, blue, purple, red, yellow, white, and black all make appearances here, and we were stumped as to why. Any ideas, anyone?