TACOMA, WA—Michael Renfro, a 68-year-old retired CPA with an apple hovering in front of his face, announced Monday that he has filed a $15...

It ends with a nice reference to a reference from Understanding Comics.

Eye Contact

It just occurred to me as I flipped through the book one more time that nobody in Fun Home ever makes eye contact. Only rarely, do they all stare at one thing, like the nonchalantly displayed corpse of a child on p. 148. What first drew me to this phenomenon was Alison's father's demeanor. He's always glancing down and away, with a bored, glossed-over look in his eyes. Considering how much she develops him as a character, Alison has a surprisingly intense (yet subtly displayed) image of her father. His eyes consistently show his complexity and distance.

The closest exception to the eye contact rule is the beginning of Chapter 6 (p. 152). In perhaps their most intimate moment, her father admits he's going to a psychiatrist. It's not until much later that he shows that kind of trust again. In the first panel, it's difficult to see their eyes, but it seems like her father is looking past her, to his left. In the second, she is dumbfounded, looking straight ahead. The third and fourth include the only example I could find where they are face-to-face. Even here, one or the other is looking down.

What I'm trying to get at it is that eye contact - or the lack thereof - shows how separated Alison's family was from each other. Like the facade of the house, their family roles seem forced and shallow, with no support of trust or intimacy. Despite how much the family member shape and perceive each other, they can't complete that basic display of connection.

If anyone cares to examine this theme further, I think Alison's own eyes mirror her personal development and self-awareness. There's a push and pull in how they resemble her father's.

Meatballs

My favorite panel so far is the middle one on p. 67 with the heading, "And perhaps my cool aesthetic distance itself does more to convey the arctic climate of our family than any particular literary comparison." Perhaps, I'm over-reading (over-viewing?) but the angle of the comic says as much as the line. Alison's parents are turned away from each other, but not quite in opposite directions. They're not in opposite directions, but rather separate paths. Alison is staring not quite at her father. It seems like she's staring through him. The overall angle includes a line of the three, but looking down and off-center, almost like a camera panning a scene for emphasis. And of course, meatballs.

The panel resonated in an "oh, that's what she's trying to say" way. Until that point, I hadn't bought into the graphic novel platform or distinguished how Fun Home would balance the story of her father with a 'traditional' autobiography. The way in which angle and nonchalant meatballs complemented the heading amplified "cool aesthetic distance" so much that it hit even a sleep-deprived me that the story of her father and the story of her were fundamentally intertwined. My perspective for the rest of the first half intensified and followed that Alison was using her relationship with her father to explain her own development and identity. Like "Understand Comics," explained, Alison in the book is this mold-able, changing medium for the audience to deeply identify with - because, and in order to, shift emphasis to her father. I don't think her name is ever mentioned, and she hardly has any dialogue. She exercises more voice and perspective through the minute labeling. Her cool, aesthetic distance is, well... meatballs.

Is creation a viable model of origins in today's modern, scientific era? Leading creation apologist and bestselling Christian author Ken Ham is joined at the...