Graphic Novels: The Ultimate Medium

Before taking this course, I knew nothing of graphic novels. I figured there was more to them than just comic books, but besides that, I didn't know anything. After reading McCloud's Understanding Comics I learned a lot about the art of graphic novels. I thought they were just words and pictures combined for authors who weren't sure if they wanted to be an artist or a writer, but I quickly learned this was wrong. McCloud's book taught me that the graphics are much more than just pretty pictures to accompany the textual plot, I saw how much emotion and feeling can be captured in an image just by the way the lines are drawn or by adding certain colors. I never thought about how difficult it must be for the artist/author to convey the other senses like smell, sound, and touch in a strictly visual medium. Thanks to this course I have a much better understanding of graphic novels and can truly appreciate how amazing they are; that they can convey every aspect of other mediums such as movies and regular novels, but all combined into one medium.