I decided to make this disassembly assignment a continuation of the blog post I created a few weeks ago. This GIF is my interpretation of the graphic novel, Seconds, where the main character, Katie, keeps eating magic mushrooms to rewrite her past. I interpreted the story in a way that Katie is slowly becoming addicted to the mushrooms and the events that happen within the story are just a hallucination from the mushrooms. Looking at my GIF frame by frame, you can see that she is slowly breaking down emotionally and physically as she keeps taking the “magic” mushrooms until she is hospitalized. There is little text to no text in this GIF and I believe that makes the story that I’m telling with it a bit more impactful.

The story within this GIF makes you wonder, “Why does she keeps taking these mushrooms if the only thing they is doing is hurting her and making her despair?” Well, that’s because of her new found addiction to them. She still believes that taking these mushrooms will help improve her life by rewriting her past; when in actuality, she is just taking them to block out her past and her failures instead.

Below, you can see where I got each and every frame for this GIF. When you looking at the novel in it’s original form, you can see that Katie isn’t really the addict my GIF makes her out to be. You can easily interpret the story in a way similar to the story in my GIF with just those images below. In some of the images, you can Katie breaking out in cold sweats and having nightmares about this shadowy demon figure that she begins to see after taking too many of the magic mushrooms and doing something else that is a pretty big spoiler, so I won’t say much about that. In another image, you see Katie wake up from rewriting her past and her mistakes the first time and she’s very happy that it actually worked, so she could(and will) do it again if she needed.

Waking up from a nightmare

Waking up from a dream before finding the magic mushrooms

Katie waking up in the hospital after rewriting her past mistakes many times

Learning about the magic mushrooms

Seeing the shadowy demon figure

Waking up after first revision

Seeing the shadowy demon figure again

Now you see why I interpreted the story in the way that I did. Many of the pages in the novel do not have a lot of actual speech, so you have to rely on the narration and the images of the novel. Thus, making the actual story open for interpretation and theories involving Katie’s addiction and use of these magic mushrooms.

Malley, Bryan Lee, and Jason Fischer. Seconds. New York: Ballantine, 2014. Print.