In comparing Victorian illustrated books with contemporary graphic novels, I found it interesting to consider how the simultaneity between the text and images of the latter and the non-simultaneity of the text and images of the latter contributes to how each medium projects meaning. Earlier in the course, I've found it interesting how illustrations in Victorian books often anticipate the textual scenes they are depicting, leaving the reader to essentially predict how the illustration they are looking at fits into the story.

Something I found interesting in this week's study of Clemence Housman's The Were-Wolf is the similarity in framing between Laurence Housman's illustrations and many of the Pre-Raphaelite illustrations (e.g., those by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais) we looked at while studying The Moxon Tennyson and "Goblin Market." Like the Pre-Rapaelites, Housman adapts to the dimensional constraints the genre of book illustrations imposes by depicting only slices of the scenes being illustrated - there often seems to be more going on out o

Something I found interesting while studying Sidney Paget's illustrations for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories is how relatively un-interperative these illustrations are in comparison with the other illustrations we have looked at so far. Paget seems to pretty faithfully and uncontroversially reproduce the scenes Doyle lays out, with few real novel contributions regarding each scene's narrative.

I found it interesting how disparate Leech's illustrations for A Christmas Carol are (so much so that I assumed they were done by different artists upon first reading it) in terms of style, method, and tone. Stylistically, the illustrations range (depending on tone, it seems) from particularly caricature-esque and cartoony to more Gothic and realist -- "Mr. Fezziwig's Ball" and "Scrooge's Third Visitor" examples of the former style, and "Last of the Spirits" and the woodcut from the second stave examples of the latter stlye.

One thing I found interesting during my preliminary research on the texts we'll be reading this semester is that Pamela Colman Smith, the author/illustrator of Annancy Stories, illustrated the Rider-Waite tarot cards, of which I had a deck when I was a kid. It made me think about how I never really think of iconic imagery like that as being the product of an individual artist, though I guess obviously it'd necessarily have to be.