Marisol Vazquez Professor Joyce LEH 301 May 21, 2011 Soaked in Blood Review The saying says

that a picture contains a thousand words, sometimes this is true other times it is not. However, this is true in literary graphic novels because pictures must convey chapters worth of detail, emotion, and dialogue. The interesting fact about graphic novels is that they dont ask you to image, instead they give you the visual. For authors it is hard to choose the right words that bring the readers that mental image you are trying to convey. This is why it is amazing when a graphic novelist can summarize a critical time period of Colombian history into fewer pages without cheating from the emotion a text book writer was trying to depict. In Soaked in Blood, by Andres Gomez Legizamon, he makes used of two important drawing techniques that help summarize what Tina Rosenberg wrote in her book about La Violencia in Colombia. The first important technique is the use of color. The majority of graphic novels do not make use of color, and when they do it is for special reason and adds a bigger significance and symbolic meaning to story. In this novel the only color they use is red. Red the color for violence and passion. It matches perfectly with given name to this time period La Violencia and it matches with their passion to see their goals come into fruition and their enemies destroyed. As a reader, every time red is shown their is a shocking factor to the senses. As if one minute you were in a dark room and suddenly the lights were turned on. Since this author makes no use of any other color he has to cleverly apply the shades of gray, white and black.

Flipping through the novel, notice that there are very few scenes that are shaded in with a true black, most of the scenes have a greyish black. Therefore, when black is applied, it becomes a symbolism to treachery, deceit, and death. It is used to emphasized sounds (e.i. p. 7, 52, or 70) to represent the suddenness and how startled the victims became. It was sometimes used in the characters hair. Black hair is a representation of youth and yet, their is a huge contrast with the haggard and beaten down faces of the character (e.i p. 8 or 41). This goes to show and the toll of worry, anxiety, and depression La Violencia had on the people, people became old before their time. Lastly, black was also use bring the feeling to foreshadow nefarious plans and emphasize death. The pages that make us of black the most in the coloring of characters occurs as they hatch the plan to kill Jorge Elicer Gaitan, his murder, and the first two pages after his murder (p. 11-15) Unlike in a textbook, in where everything is the same size, in a graphic novel, drawing come in all shapes and sizes. This means that all pictures are competing for space. There is an implied understanding that the bigger the picture the more attention it will receive, the bigger the picture the more importance it has. Most importantly the bigger the picture the more insight into the authors own thoughts and opinions about this critical time period; it is the author who decides what to emphasize, what is it that he wants you to pay special attention to. Many times it is a picture that you would normal would have glanced at but not particular spend a minute analyzing. To support this point, in page sixty there is a picture that outsizes the other boxes and it is a close up on the face of Pablo Escobar. The close up is big enough that it fails to draw in the entire head of this mean. However, there is close attention to the eyes, forehead, and nose. It is this emphasis that tells me the reader what the author thinks of Pablo Escobar. There is a constant

debate on whether he was a hero or cruel man, and Gomez is of the opinion of the latter. His face is marked with touches of impatience, cruelty, and anger; along with the black surrounding his face it gives a feeing that this is man you do not want to annoy, a man that does not give out too much mercy. A second example, is in page 56, again this is a picture of a switch with the pad of a finger touching it. Regularly this will not have too much importance but the sizes tell us that the author thinks that Escobars imprisonment was a joke and an insult and they compound this insult by giving him access to the gates that keep him closed in. Graphic novels are good sources of information however, they do work best as a supplement for textbooks. The problem with graphic novels is that, depending on the reader, they might not comprehend the importance of an image. It is also difficult to know if you are giving it the right interpretation. In research it has been discovered that the attribute to the meaning of a facial expression shifts from culture to culture. However, they appeal more the readers and when done right it bring back with more accuracy a time period not experience by future and spresent generations.