An example of a PEEL paragraph about Ghostopolis

Let’s start by looking at the opening panels of Ghotopolis, by Doug TenNapel.

The opening panels of Ghostopolis

What do you notice?

Before doing any writing, it’s important to take the time to study your subject and make some notes.

There are two important questions you want to be thinking about:

What is the author trying to communicate?
How do they communicate it?

To answer the second question, you can ask sub-questions like these:

What moments are being shown?
How many panels are there?
How do the panels flow from one to the other?
How much time passes between each panel?
How are elements composed within each panel? (Characters, objects, environments)
How is colour used?
What narration or dialogue is given?

There are all sorts of things you can notice. If anything, it's easy to overlook the most obvious facts—nothing should be too obvious for you to make a note about it!

Write some notes about what you notice here.

Here are some notes about what I see in the panels.

Driving through a suburb. We think a plane is landing but really it’s a toy. Makes me think the characters are travelling, maybe driving to a new home. Colour: grey and blue. Cool, drab, dull. Flat. Two big square frames. Camera pulls out slightly, turns plane into a toy. Suburb. Contrast with plane dialogue about turbulence and barfing: adventure, disaster, drama. Suburb is predictable and safe. The child with the plane wants something more intense.

Writelike

Once we have collected some observations and thoughts, we can look for an interesting question or observation that might be worth writing about.

For instance, in this case I’m interested in the economy of visual storytelling—how much information is communicated in two almost identical frames.

After we have a question, we can write an analysis or argument about our subject, and for this we can use the PEEL structure as a scaffold.

Here is an example of a PEEL paragraph written from my notes above.

The first page of Ghostopolis conveys a substantial amount of information and mood, even though it consists of only two panels. The colour palette is muted blues and and greens, creating a flat, depressed feeling. The environment is equally dull—an innocuous suburb, a drab car interior. The subtle pulling-out effect created between the panels plays with our sense of scale, making us realise that the plane is a toy. From these two simple, almost identical panels, the reader understands they are following the story of a child who lives in a drab, humdrum world but is hungry for drama and action. This level of economical storytelling, using multiple devices to create complex effects, is used throughout the Ghostopolis.

Writelike

Point: There are lots of points you could make about these panels, but I was most interested in the fact that the panels are almost identical, so I chose to highlight the economy of storytelling.

Evidence: My evidence consists of three observations about colour, environment and the relationship between the panels.

Explanation: I’ve elaborated on my evidence, spelling out exactly what it means.

Link: To wrap up the paragraph, I’ve linked the evidence and explanations back to the original point (economy of storytelling) and I’ve set up for the next paragraph by implying we’ll look at another example of the same type of economy.

For the rest of this lesson we’ll write a new PEEL paragraph, using the example above as a model.

Writing a PEEL paragraph about a graphic novel (Ghostopolis)

An example of a PEEL paragraph about Ghostopolis