First of all, I have to express my awe at what a group of dedicated Stanford students are able to produce when put together. The story captured my attention from the beginning and I was so moved by its message. Beautifully done.
After I began reading Pika-don, I saw noticeable differences in the blog choice and visual style between this graphic novel and Hartzell’s. The first was the lack of any recognizable pattern in terms of the structure of the panels and use of frames, which might have seemed chaotic in another setting but worked extremely well in helping the authors tell the story and convey the message they wanted. The structure and layout of each page has a purpose and works effectively to move the story along and engage the reader. For example, from the very first page, the image of the ship sailing towards a sunset invites the reader to follow the narrator on his journey and listen to what he has to say. At the same time, the position of the ship can also be viewed as coming towards the reader, as if beckoning the reader to join the narrator on the boat. The text is minimal here, as it is throughout the novel, and I can’t decide if the novel seems more dreamlike, more like me watching a movie of what is happening, or more like me occupying the shadow behind narrator as he moves throughout the novel. It seems dreamlike at the beginning of some of the “chapters,” when the authors blend the use of panels with a background of imagery and minimal text, which can be seen on pages 29, 103 and 163, for example. It seems more like a movie in the authors’ use of perspective, and what angles of a scene they choose to show us, like on pages 4-6, demonstrated by the movement from big picture of the people cheering (on page 4) to a close up of just the boy, to a zoomed out, bird’s-eye view of the boy, to a focus on his book and then panning out to see him reading and walking with minimal, narrative text. It also seems like a movie from the selective use of full page spreads that highlights a scene that is particularly important, like his plan to save his family (26), the kindness of people despite overall suffering from the bomb (80), his reunion with his family (95), etc. I feel like a shadow when the authors choose to draw angles in which I feel like I’m right next to the characters (for example, on pages 10-11). Despite varied use of structure and layout, it is obvious that there is a lot of control over the portrayal of the story, and this adds mystery and anticipation for the reader because one does not know what to expect not only with the turn of the page, but from each page since the changes and level of detail forces the reader to slow down and really see everything.
Another visual style I found particularly effective was the way in which each scene was drawn and how abrupt changes in the method/mode of drawing is itself a nonverbal message to the reader. The hand-drawn technique (versus a digitized form) is important to this novel. It begins with minimal, clean, mostly-straight lines that are thin. Despite the brevity of the subject and the anticipation that this subject brought me, I was calm because the scenery was calm. The lines begin multiplying and becoming thicker when Tsutomu receives the assignment to go to Hiroshima, and which increased my anxiety (30-35). The abrupt, but still somewhat subtle, shift back to cleaner, thinner lines fools me for a moment when Tsutomu gets off the bus to walk to work (39-40), and confuses me when time seems to stop as mostly white space occupies the page as he looks off into the distance (41), only to hit me when the bomb lands. After that, the drawing technique does a 180 degree turn, and it seems like the dream, movie, and “reality” converges together. The lines are thick and rough, curving and mixing with minimal thinner lines, creating motion. Black dominates the pages and the color gray is more prominent whereas before it was too subtle to count as part of the tri-color scheme (44-49). Everything is chaotic, and I don’t know where to look first. The imagery reinforces the shock, the horror and the pain Tsutomu must have felt in me, especially on pages 56-57. This pattern repeats itself again in a lesser degree with the authors’ portrayal of Nagasaki because readers now expect it, only to really hit it home with the 2-page spread of the bomb and accompanying text (126-27). I believe this visual style is so effective that by the end that I can really appreciate and understand the gravity of the message the authors are trying show throughout this novel, with Tsutomu’s words about war and the hope he had for the future. As readers, we can already sense what the authors’ are trying to impart on us earlier on, but its impact can only be felt, to me at least, through the visual style employed.
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