Remix Project

With this remix, I wanted to bring in both something that I personally had an interest in, in the comic book universe, but also the knowledge that I have been growing while studying in the graphic novel literature class this semester. With this in mind, I knew that I wanted to look at the Darkest Night/Brightest Day arc in Green Lantern and utilize some of the major visual thematic and sort of motif elements that it contained. Continually through the arc, a major element is the connection of color and the spectrum of light with the emotions and energy of the different people and creatures. In “Understanding Comics”, McCloud relates color to part of the creation of the continuing myth of the superhero and the continuation of the hero as a symbol. Within the Green Lantern comics, the color is repeatedly used in order to strengthen ideas of identity and driving emotions between the many different characters where the color that the character is drawn in will show the reader the strongest emotions of the character. The Green Lantern comics are very strong in their focus on utilizing both the written word to further the story, but also the strong visual art in order to explore the different characters and events. McCloud also relates how color makes the images in comics become more “real” to the reader, but also how it is itself a multi-faceted and layered part of the comics and works to form stronger significance and make the world a “playground of shapes and space”. With this in mind, I manipulated the comic in order to take away one of the strong repeated elements that were used to visually explore the story that was being told, and transfer it into black and white and then invert those colors when the page already had a strong black and white visual presence. The comic was very interesting to read without the large visual affect that it would tend to have on the reader and slightly made the characters feel slightly disingenuous in there speech versus their emotions. The arc’s story also deals with ideas of death, and the fight against death as it tries to overcome the universe, and the rebirth of many of the characters in the universe and the extended universe. In order to shorten the comic into the panels that I wanted, I changed the theme and story slightly in order to do almost the opposite, and focus on death and the increasing power that it might have in the universe, rather than the fight against it. With this theme and coloring in line, I also used the image trace tool in order retrace the defining line work that the artist used in the images to support the foreboding and dark atmosphere that I was moving toward and created something I felt was more akin to something like sin city rather than the bright and colorful fights between colors and light spectrum in the Green Lantern arc.