INTRODUCTION

Introduction

For this essay I will be researching and discussing the following subjects; Characters and archetypes, Graphic symbolism, economy and minimalism, the representation of attitudes and cultural mores, and cross-cultural and how they can be used in illustrations, comics, graphic novels. My fascination takes me towards characters and archetypes because it has been globally taking subject in any cartoon, and comics and is a big part of comic book success without heroes or a villain there isn’t much of a story to tell with no plot or narrative. On the other hand the representation and cultural mores really interests me because of the topics you can talk about like race and political rights used in graphic novels. With graphic symbolism you can change the way people think and approach different illustrations from the history of the image or even the surrounding and detail of the image. Economy and minimalism is great for expression and showing emotion through line strokes and cartoon exaggerated features but with cross culture you can see how popular countries have shown their own style but also influenced and inspired other countries like Japan and their Japanese manga comics.

Within this essay I will be introducing other people opinions and research such as bloggers and interviews with the illustrators themselves like Takashi Okazaki for example. I enjoyed researching into him and his work because you got to find out what the character stood for and where the ideas and inspirations came from when creating the character spoken from the illustrators themselves. Other artists I have searched in to be Akira Toriyama, Stephan Raynor, Yoshito Usui, Joe Shuster, and Jim Davies.