Bechdel's Fun Home by Janne Classen

 1.        Fun Home is mixed cartoony and realistic. I like to consider it realistic with a cartoony twist. I say this because the faces have real details but arennot exactly real faces. For example, they have mouth/laugh lines but cartoony noses. There is no question as to who is in the panel as each character is distinctive, but the faces don't change much expression wise throughout the whole work. There are a lot of small details in the background of the panels. Details of the (ugly) furniture, the chandelier and the wallpaper, the father uses in the remodel. Compared to some of the other works we read in class, like Road To Perdition, the work is light on shading. It is all done in ink (black and white) except for the use of a watered down blue/gray color. This highly contrasted the bright orange color of my copy's cover. It was almost a trick, the cover was so bright and cheery but the context was heavy.  This style is perfect for the work I think. The narration is very heavy, if there were anymore colors the pages would be super busy and hard to follow.

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2.       I believe it was written as a graphic novel first to be able to have the heavy narration. With a film, it would be weird to have a constant narrator looming over every scene. As a novel it could work but the way the narration does not completely match up with the pictures would make it difficulty to understand with just description. Secondly, It also lends itself to being stuck as a graphic novel due to the jumps between her  childhood and the adulthood. It also allows for the jumps back in time between time when she is older. It kinda gets to be a lot to keep up with. You need to be able to read at your own pace to keep up with when or when she is. Also, She is battling in her head on whither her dad killed himself or if it was an accident, it is hard to wage an war with yourself in another median without seeming a bit off. As a film you would lose the ability to do the jumps and inner war, and as a novel it would be to muddled and she would have to say things like "ok now back to when I was blah blah blah." No one wants to read that.

3.       Alison is our narrator. She tells her story of growing into who she really is as a women and lesbian. She uses her family, mostly her father's story as she makes her journey. It is in first person point of view and, as I mentioned, does not always match up with the pictures exactly. It makes since in context but when she is looking at her naked girlfriend and quoting (what I assume is) Ulysses, or looking at her father asking him for money and quoting The Great Gatsby it can be weird if you happened to just flip to that page to see what the novel was about.

4.         Looking at a young child, most often you can tell instantly when's the father has been in charge of dressing them. The outfits normally don't match, color or style wise. This is one thing that made the third panel on page 15 important to me. Not behold on to a stereotype but not many men are into fashion, or even the decorating of a house. Most have no opinion when asked from my experience. So for the daughter to not care about her neckline and it to be a big deal to her father is a bit strange. It shows their roles are reversed. Her father is slightly feminine and she is a little masculine. That is really what the whole page is trying to show, they are opposites. They are playing each other roles.