Analyzing Comics

The comic book that I am analyzing is Ultimate Spiderman: El Capítulo Final. Needless to say, the comic is in Spanish. I am able to speak a small amount of Spanish, however not enough to completely understand the dialect. The cover is interesting with a large picture of Spiderman that appeals to the audience in a good way. Each page has roughly half a dozen “slides” if you will. Each slide has some sort of dialect ranging from just a word or two all the way to multiple sentences. Whenever there is a sound there is a word to describe it, which is onomatopoeia. The pictures are very detailed and include expressions on people’s faces, details in the clothes, writing on signs. One thing that comics in general have that most other forms of writing do not have is direct conversation. The style of writing is in speech bubbles so everything being said is in conversation between characters. There is not really a narrator. Because I cannot analyze the dialogue due to the foreign language I will analyze the dialogue of Lynda Berry’s comic now that I have analyzed the pictures of Spiderman. Berry’s comic is a bit different than Spiderman in that the writing has two forms. There is a story at the top of each page and then speech bubbles below which is the conversation between various characters. The speech bubbles almost are examples of the writing above. For example, on the first page the narrator explains how all houses smell different from one another regardless of whether the same air fresheners were used. The speech bubbles say, “What kind is that again?” “Fresh evergreen glen.” “Yeah. At the Bidman’s they got the same kind but here it smells like a fresh, um, bus bathroom.” So as one can see, the speech bubbles basically support the text above. Similarly to Spiderman, this comic also has explanation of noises. For example, on page 514 it says, “Breathing through my mouth” next to the boy so that the reader can picture the boy breathing while his mother talks. These captions represent the thinking of the characters.