Is Anyone Else Pronouncing It "fyoon hōm"?

The images in Fun Home have a definite style, which is distanced just far enough from minimalism to seem complex. Characters are drawn with little shading, few details other than the necessary, defined mostly by face shape and hair, and even have very similar expressions in most panels. Even characters shown in films or in flashbacks seem to have small creases under their eyes and frown slightly. (For examples of the general expression, check pages 14, 21, 42, 77, 118, 129, 177, 200, 213, and 229. Alternatively, roll 2d100+4d8.)

This is, as with anything consciously drawn so many times, an artistic choice, and the meaning isn’t tough to grok. FH is at least partly a depressed story, lingering around death, emotional damage, dysfunctional relationships, negligence and secrets. Everyone has a similar expression because that’s the way they were perceived at the time. This style of drawing people exists, on the sliding scale of realism vs. the conceptual, only slightly towards the real. The backgrounds are more idealized and head toward the conceptual, unless there are important details to notice. Scott McCloud talks about these sudden jumps in complexity in page 44 of Understanding Comics, during that bit where he plays with the short-sword (which looks very much like a fancy-hilted gladius).

There’s also an exception in FH which proves the rule. Everything is mildly cartoonish, jumping to prominence as the plot demands, but only during the story proper. Chapters have their own images, and these are fully shaded. They’re not exactly photorealistic, at least not by the standards nine years hence, but they look like grainy printed copies or high-quality charcoal rubbing of real things. They demonstrate the conceit of the other images, and also (if you want to be shallow about it) confirm the artistic talent of the author.

In fact, there seems to be a deliberate conservation of detail throughout this story, or maybe it would be better called and ebb and flow of detail- the panels that make up the story are all done in a consistent style and stretch out for dozens of pages, while one much more realistic image exists to show a lot of extra meaning that the subsequent chapter balances out. Information is conveyed at two different paces, intentionally working in tandem because understanding the realistic version requires a foray into the author’s memory, where everything unimportant has been omitted from the retelling.

Concerning the Slanted Lines in Cowborg

Cowborg is a comic very fond of wide, open scenes that bleed off of the page (or, technically, about a quarter-inch from the margin), and contains two separate two-page spreads, but apart from that it uses the typical square panel layout to communicate its story. To be fair, it's not a very challenging or avant-garde story, even in the realm of the bizarre- it's certainly no Steel Ball Run- but for a Chick-Fil-A comic it is pretty impressive.

The part I'll be drawing your attention to, though, is this section:

Now, these three panels are the only ones with slanted borders on their page, in the surrounding five pages, and possibly in the entire comic. They're also a montage, and all of the story before and after them is a clear narrative- scientist makes Cowborg, Cowborg trains, Cowborg goes to state fair, Beef-Eating Villain reveal, showdown, heroic triumph. This is a break from the story's regular pace, expressed only by turning the panels 45 degrees so that scanning them horizontally encompasses some of the second while reading the first, and some of the third while reading the second. No special attention is paid to it, but it manages to exist wordlessly as a completely separate timeframe.

Well, apart from the NA-NA-NA-NA!

Concerning the Circle on Page 37 of Fun Home

There's some intent that can be coaxed out of these panels, with the way that smaller information boxes are placed inside them, in the way that they show what is basically a montage while the text outside of them does most of the describing, and so on. However, the big eye-catcher here is the small circle in the bottom third of the page. See it? This isn't the first time these explanatory bubbles have pointed at things, but it is the first time one's been used to make up a panel. Or a semi-panel, perhaps, given that its equally an intruder in both of its neighbors. The shape is also different from the rest while still being part of the typical eye-path that makes it a part of comics' linear time instead of an aside.

I'm convinced it's a stylistic choice held in reserve, like an expression that conveys an idea wonderfully, but is so obscure it's never used. It doesn't really advance the story, or show us things from the perspective of the author (at least, when she was a kid), but it does a great job of revealing details about its setting. It's a silent moment of worldbuilding, unacknowledged by its story.