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.