Ovens_Podcast

The podcast discusses the Adventure Time comic "Grables and Schmables" Part 1, featuring Finn and Jake. They find a cube in the woods and bring it home, but it turns out to be dangerous. The podcast covers Scott McCloud's comic theories on closure, time manipulation, and character design. The comic effectively uses these concepts, and the speaker recommends checking out Part 2. welcome to my first podcast. This is on the Adventure Time comic Grables and Schmables part 1 starring Finn and Jake from the cartoon Adventure Time on Cartoon Network. There is a part 2 to this but I chose to do part 1 to save time since I only have a few minutes but Finn and Jake they go help Party God and discover a tiny cube by itself in the middle of the woods. For their adventure they don't even leave their living room and they take it back to save the cube because it's kind of like a baby. Turns out to be not so harmless so we're going to cover some of Scott McCloud's comic book theories and transitions, talk about characters and artwork. For my first topic I want to cover is closure using McCloud's idea that the mind has to fill the gaps between panels. I'm not sure what ages these are on this comic because it doesn't give me a page number unfortunately but Finn and Jake had just found the cube in the forest and one panel is Finn saying that he speaks fluent baby and they're in the woods you can see the trees and the grass and everything and they're walking they're clearly walking away from the reader and then the immediate next panel on the same page is Finn scratching the cube like it's a little baby and they're inside of a cabin now and it's the immediate next panel so it makes the reader have to fill in the blanks here and like perceive it as a whole so I think that's pretty fun. One of my favorite parts of this comic was the time manipulation. The panel size and shape changed how long the moments felt. Finn and Jake are in this other reality in this little tiny cube that's kind of controlling them and sending them to another universe where they're not seen and not perceived by other characters so there's one part where we see this really red dark scene where Finn and Jake are like screaming and they're scared and then the next panel shows the little cube projecting them onto the screen so we're back in the club or the treehouse we're seeing Finn and Jake on this screen that the cube is projecting so it feels like we're in both scenes we're both in both times but the way it's illustrated it's very clever and everything feels pretty quick here and it kind of feels like a TV show which it is it's a TV show on TV so I think it's cool how that has the reader kind of like a viewer of the comic book. The final Macleod idea that I want to talk about is character design and amplification through simplification. Finn is such a simple character his eyeballs are literally just black circles but he expresses so much emotion and the artist and the author sometimes if he's scared there'll be huge black circles with white in the middle and then like he's pulling his face down because he's in fear which is completely different than his normal eyeballs which are just literal black circles then Jake he has big white eyes and black around it but when he's looking at the pie that was just made they're fully black with white kind of glistening and long longing eyes for the pie so these characters are very simple and it's easy to see the emotion in them because they are just so simple and their eyes are just black. So we are coming to the end of the podcast let's wrap up what we talked about using the Macleod idea of closure the reader has to fill in the blank sometimes because when you're reading a comic you don't have to have every single action or thought or movement that the character makes obviously because then it would be way too long and that wouldn't make much sense so we just have to perceive the whole picture when we're reading a comic and I think this Adventure Time comic does that very well along with the time manipulation and the panel transitions because there's a lot of times in this comic where Ben and Jake are jumping into different realities and jumping back out of it and I didn't mention it before but they're also using like words like whoosh or panting because he's running through the woods and then the character design using very simple designs to show a range of emotions all of those Macleod talks about in his book overall I love this comic I love this show and again I didn't cover part two of the comic here because I knew I wouldn't have enough time but definitely gonna check it out and you guys should check it out and that's all from me and remember never trust a tiny cube in the woods bye bye