McCloud part 1

The Eerie Chronicles by Toki www.foolstrip.com/index.php/id=16&serie=15&page=1 has many of the characteristics that Scott McCloud mentions in Understanding Comics. Understanding Comics is a comic book itself about the creation and interpretation of comics.
The Eerie Chronicles is drawn in black and white, and although I haven't read anything in McCloud yet about color, I assume that color choice has an impact on the reader. The first panel has no characters or dialouge in it. It is just used to "...set the mood or a sense of place..."(McCloud 103) This helps the reader get a feeling of hte comic and know what kind of emotions are present. Another panel in the comic shows one of the characters smoking a cigarette. It is drawn with wavy lines coming out of it. McCloud points out that "This is the artist's way of telling you there's smoke coming..."(128) or it is on fire.
The entire first page of the comic deals with the idea of closure. You only see the character's legs or feet. Maybe half of a face to a hand. You never get the whole picture. McCloud gives an excellent example of this in Understanding Comics by showing himself in several panels without his legs and saying "In this panel you can't even see my legs, yet ypu assume that they are there" (61). That is the same idea used in the comic I found. We assume that everyone has more to their body than just their legs or arm so our minds fill in the blanks to create a whole person.
There is also a panel in the comic that zooms in on one of the characters and his eye fills the entire panel. You see huge sweat bead running down his face. This is another element mentioned by McCloud. He describes tools like this as "indicators of emotion" and says that they are "visually based" (130). So the sweat bead allow us to see that the charater is nervous and the close up of hte eye reminds us of our eyes getting bigger due to anxiety or maybe fear. Either way these two elements added together give us a sense of the characters emotions.