During the final week of class, we discussed Emily Carroll’s Through the Woods. We also briefly talked about the Gothic Horror genre and tropes. That made me ponder about the other comics and graphic novels that we read throughout the course and if they had some these tropes. The first reading that came to mind was Akira. I believe none of the classic tropes appeared in the first volume, but later on in the series the whole “one room that no one should enter” shows up and is rather important to the plot. As you know, when you enter one of these rooms, bad things will happen to either the character or make the plot take a huge turn. You can say that The Super story from the Will Eisener’s, The Contract With God, has one. The room where the super goes to look at all of his pornography and allows the little girl would be that room because everything goes downhill from there.

The set of stories that were included in Carrol’s graphic novel were pretty strange and unique. They also feel very familiar and similar to something else that I’ve seen, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I’m not a person who usually gets scared, but I would be lying if I said these stories didn’t shake me up. I never really did like the woods even though the house I grew up in is basically in the middle of one, but I’m not too fond of blood and these stories had some vibrant reds that were usually being used for the blood in the stories. I still enjoyed reading them because I love how horror stories can leave you nervous and pretty shaken up.

To conclude, each of these stories seemed pretty similar, but they do have their own uniqueness to them. I also wonder if my classmates noticed  that we looked at some other stories this semester that could be considered Gothic Horror. Also, the room I was talking about in Akira is the room where the boy Akira is frozen that no is allowed to go to.