Mira Jacob's Visual Storytelling
We talked last post about how to create your own paper dolls à la Mira Jacob, so this post, we thought we’d dig a little deeper into her style and its effects in her graphic memoir Good Talk.
As we said, Jacob creates “paper dolls” of the people in her life. She then uses these same comic images overlaid on different backgrounds, creating a collage effect. Each character is drawn simply with a few lines, straight-on, often from the chest up, with a gray fill to indicate skin color. The characters are not drawn to show movement—it appears instead as though they were sitting for a photo session at a portrait studio, full frontal, the face they show to the world. Jacob uses her own drawn characters recursively—meaning the one shot of Mira we see at the beginning in her conversation with Z (her son) is employed again in multiple different situations. Throughout the book, Z remains the same, and Mira only exists in a few variations, one for each stage of her life. The effect is an interesting one when considered in the scope of motherhood, a central concern of the book—the sense of repetition that is created makes one think of a reality of life for any caregiving person—that, often, the same questions are played out over and over, the only thing that changes is the background.
Jacob’s use of the same “paper dolls” is also employed with other, minor characters. The white people in her life—men she has dated, women her brother has dated, a man she met at a party who assumed she was the waitress, and more, are re-used as other (white) people who give different racist and unnecessary comments. In this way, the white people in Jacob’s life bleed together, and all become a forceful amalgam of various aggressions. In a text that explores race, Jacob reverses what often occurs to people of color under a white racist’s lens—that people of color become one entity, an “other” signified by skin color alone. The use of “stock” white characters is an effective and affecting use of recursive image in Good Talk.
Jacob also uses real photos to great effect in her graphic memoir in conversation. She often places her drawn characters against a “real,” captured background. Sometimes it is as innocuous as a bed made up in white sheets, while others are more central to a specific conversation she is having with Z—for example, a scene of protest after the murder of Michael Brown acts as a backdrop as Mira explains the circumstances of his death to her young son.
When first introducing her own mother, father, and brother, Jacob uses actual photographs—this is one of the only times we get to see the “real” image of people in her world; the other is pictures of her husband, Jed. We rarely see photos of people, but when we do it reminds us that the cartoony, drawn images are in fact real people. The photographs, in confirming the existence of the characters, also then act as a way of affirming that the conversations presented in the text are also authentic.
We look forward to seeing your paper dolls in action, having authentic conversations in captured environs. Feel free to share them if you make them!
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Find out some of Jacob’s inspirations for Good Talk in this interview with BOMB.