The Last Week o Comics

This week I read a bunch of webcomics: 
 

YU+ME Dream  http://rosalarian.com/yume/ 

Chester 5000 XYV jessfink.com/Chester5000XYV 

TJ and Amal http://tjandamal.com/

The Meek http://www.meekcomic.com/

Hanna is Not a Boy’s Name http://hanna.aftertorque.com/ 

Chester

      I’d have to say out of all the webcomics I have read, Chester 5000 XYV is the most outlandish.  When I first looked at this comic I was like what in God’s name am I looking at.  But I decided not to freak out and I actually read through it in two nights. Frankly, I think Chester is hilarious. I really liked the style of it, all of the swoopy shapes.  It’s weird, her drawings are completely impossible with ridiculously pushed poses but they really work and add to the eccentric quality of the comic.  That’s part of the reason I liked it, it was something different and I think the artist pulled it off really well.  I think the author of it has really come a long way in terms of plot, too.         The story started out as basically smut. Smut everywhere, which is entertaining, but not probably the best thing to drive a story.  But lately it’s been more plot driven, focusing more on character interactions and less on gratuitous sex scenes.

       I also really enjoyed the fact that the characters talk with symbols instead of words.  It reminded me a lot of Shaun Tan's Arrival.  While The Arrival focused on more gestures to understand what was going on, Chester's symbols basically gave you the gist of what was going on.  It really gets the point across and I’ve never been left confused by what the characters are saying.  It adds to the simplistic monochromatic panels and just makes the comic a fun and easy read.

      

TJ and Amal

       I’ve been reading The Less than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal since my friend Pinky showed it to me freshmen year.  I really love this comic and I read it as it updates every week religiously.  What I really like about TJ and Amal is it really captures a normal lifelike story.  It seems completely plausible and although it does have NSFW content, it works with the story and it’s not completely random.  The story itself is no fast paced action piece, but it’s comfortable.  It reminds me that the best stories don’t have to have gut wrenching romance or special effects or excessive violence.  It’s about characters and relationships and the choices you make.  I mean, this comic sounds like a story about two of my friends roadtripping. 

I’ve constantly reread this comic and it never gets old.  It’s witty and I always get a laugh out of her dialogue.  Plus the artist actually understands how to draw. Her panels are smartly made, it’s not always just a frontal shot of her characters, she knows how to work the space of her environment and it helps the story feel more realistic.
     

The Meek

         

       I am not really a big fan of The Meek.  I really like how detailed her comic is, I mean it’s full color, her drawings are really nice, and I really like the giant scary tiger Dagre.  But that’s about it. 

      I’ve tried to read this comic, like I have it bookmarked, and I try to come back to it every once in awhile to get through it, but it is too slow for me.  I mean, the plot does progress, but it drags.  Every time I look at a new page I feel like I’m no closer to any sort of plot point.  I think it’s partially because Luca’s story was the only one that interested me because I didn’t really like characters.  They didn’t really do anything that made me like them.  I only was interested in Luca because he was mentally unstable and was seeing a giant tiger that was scary as hell.  I don’t really understand Angora, she just seems to be naked in the woods. Like I’m fine if you are naked in the woods in a commune, but there’s got to be a reason for staying naked after awhile. 

Hanna is Not a Boy’s Name

     I’m a big fan of the paranormal, so Hanna was right up my alley.  It wasn’t the most original story I’ve ever read and it was basically broken up into mini adventures, but it was entertaining as hell.

      First of all, I’m a big fan of this comic and when she stopped updating I was pretty devastated.  I decided to reread this comic, since I hadn’t read it since freshman year.  I think the most intriguing part about Hanna is that reading the comic itself is visually stimulating.  The graphic design concerning the lettering on all the panels were so different.  They really brought something new to the table.  At times they could be a little confusing and I wasn’t sure where to read first, but I think overall the design was really original.  And you can really see as the pages progress how Tessa’s artwork improved as well as the visual elements in her pages. 
     Actually, before this comic was canceled due to the fact that she was being sued for having the same name as another comic or something, this comic had a huge following.  I have seen countless cosplays of this comic in particular and it was really upsetting when she stopped updating it.

YU+ME Dream

      

       I can’t believe I actually read this whole thing. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but it was very long.  Like I think it’s one of the longest comics I have read.  It seems like one central story in the beginning, a simple high school story, but once you get past that it’s like you opened the floodgates to the Dreamworld and that’s where things get really interesting.  But there were a lot of characters and things did get a bit complicated for me especially when I was around page 735.  And there were a lot of jarring plot twists that left me pretty frazzled.

       But I really did like YU+ME Dream, because it really is basically one of a kind.  There really aren’t that many lesbian comics that actually have a plot and aren’t just smut.  I do attribute it to the fact that it seems that comics written by women tend to be more story driven versus more physically driven.  And in this comic, like Hanna, you can really see her artwork came a long way.  She experimented with many different styles like illustrator, photography, and clay.  I remember thinking to myself if I ever created a comic I would want to try something like this. 

       In general, I think the comic did hit on a bunch of points that most people miss.  None of her characters were truly bad, they were just misunderstood or they lost their way.  What I enjoyed most in this comic was the concept of having a concept and finding yourself. And even though I did have to go back and reread parts of it when I got confused with the plot, I still hold this comic in high regard and I would read it again in a heartbeat.
      This comic actually really reminded me of a book that I read called Going Bovine by Libba Bray.  They have the same sort of derailed beginning where someone uses a sort of dreamworld to escape from a reality that they don't want.  It is in this new reality they can find what they never could in the real world.  And they both end similarly, too.  Both sort of have a death with a possibility for rebirth.  In Going Bovine, Cameron finally heads to the end of this ride he always thought he would die on with the girl he loves named Dulcie.  In YU+ME, Fiona and Lia jump into the portal to be reborn again in the real world.

Neil Gaiman and the Sandman

As an avid reader of Neil Gaiman's work, this comic was right up my alley.  Gaiman's work always has a great sense fantasy and really good character development.  His stories are always really nice to read because they are something different and they have a really good central story.  I've read The Graveyard Book, Anasai Boys, and seen a bunch of Neverworld episodes.  The narration in particular in the beginning and the end involving the Sandman was absolutely lovely to read and had a very old storybook quality to it.

That being said, I think the most engaging panels were the ones with the Sandman in it.  As a character he was really appealing and intriguing.  I was kind of bored with the usual heroine character who lost her memories.  I really wanted more of that character and I'm sure the other comics are different and include him more.  It seemed more interesting if we were to follow more of his side of the story because there isn't a lot of writing that follows an outsider character.  I did really enjoy the bit about the Cuckoo and the creepy neighbor who opened his chest and birds came out.  That idea was really original and it was illustrated really well with the panels showing the birds flying out and making people's dreams turn into nightmares.

It wasn't the best drawn comic.  In one of the pages where Barbie was lying on the sofa she just disappeared out of one of the panels and I got really confused. I was like WHERE DID SHE GO. And some of it was horrific like when the girl stabbed that guy's skin to the wall and took out his tongue and it was just hanging there on the wall.

This really reminded me of two things: Alice in Wonderland as well as a comic I read earl
ier in the semester called Princess Amethyst.  Both involve a naive girl entering a sort of magical 'dream' world where they have been before but have lost and/or forgotten their exploits.  In order to fix their problems they must come to terms with what they have lost and meet their final boss battle.

The main cast of the comic was particularly mind boggling.  We have a drag queen, two lesbians, a creepy neighbor, a shady Jesus-praying neighbor lady, and our heroine who doesn't dream anymore.  In the beginning I actually thought everyone was a lesbian and I was really confused about why all the men were gone.  But I digress, it was a very feminist friendly comic.   If anything it was actually sidestepping men in general when the women were going to find "Barbie" and the drag queen had to stay in the real world while all the women went galavanting in the Dreamworld.  By the way her name being Barbie really drove me insane--she even looked like the Barbie doll with her platinum blonde hair and huge-- I don't even want to get into it.

Week 12: Graphic Fiction and Nonfiction

This week I read some of Berry's Britten and Brulightly.  I think the best part about this comic was the bits with the teabag.  I mean it's not everyday that there is a comic where one of the characters is a teabag.  I think it was a good device to keep the reader from being overloaded by two much information.  It gave Britten someone to talk to and it gave you a little humor here and there to break up the serious overtones.  As I was first reading it, I thought I was reading it incorrectly.  I was like, is he on the phone, there's nothing there but the teabag! But I think it really worked to show the sense of isolation that Britten has from the rest of the world. It also sort of hinted that Britten might not have all of his marbles--rather, he might not be the most reliable narrator.

What really bugged me about this comic was everything was drawn very stiffly. The main character actually looks like Hitler to me.  Like, who else had a huge honker of a nose and a tiny moustache.  I don't know why but I could never unsee it and it was actually very distracting the entire time.  My roommate thought it looked like Hitler too, so it's not just me.  I do realize he was supposed to be from Ecuador, but I mean, it was just kind of awkward.

This comic really did a good sense of detective noir: it was dark, lots of harsh contrast in every panel, and a bit grunge-y.  Also there was the constant deluge of rain which made it even more foreboding and sleazy.  Also the traditional media used to wash the panels with the blues and greys really helped form the melancholy environment in a way that made it beautiful to read each page.  The watercolor he used really added to the character of the piece.  It was very interesting to me as an artist because I have used watercolors and it is near impossible to get nice blacks and dark shades with watercolors, they tend to be way to light for me.  But I really think Berry made something different, there aren't a lot of watercolor comics out there.  It takes dedication.

Also, Britten is the typical noir antihero.  I mean, he's down on his luck, he is a fallen man, and he isn't exactly a sunshine of joy.  Britten realizes the clarity he has searched for causes nothing but problems.  Inevitably, he destroys all of his work.  It's a very negative story in general, it was very depressing in nature to read.  Everyone seemed to be be down on their luck and the sense of morality is really skewed, everyone has their own problems.  

It reminded me a lot of the movie Blade Runner.  I mean they were different because the movie is set in the future with robots and this is a more realistic story but they do have a lot in common.  For one it followed the same sort of idea of a detective story. But I think overall, they both had an unexpected ending.  The ending of Britten and Brulightly really surprised me as the concepts brought up with Blade Runner, especially the ending scene.  Also they both were sort of set in this dystopia where everything was very rainy and dark and--well, depressing.

The Geometric World of Asterios Polyp

I really enjoyed the way Mazzuchelli integrated a sense of semi-cubist deconstruction of characters.  I think it worked the best when Asterios was arguing with his wife and they were deconstructed down to shapes and Asterios was very geometric and blocky and his wife was more realistically shaded in.  I think this spoke a lot about their character where Asterios was more judgmental and rigid as a person while his wife was quiet and soft spoken.  Throughout the comic it was really easy to understand the mood that you were supposed to get from the panels with the simple color wash David put on it.

I think the little things in this comic really worked to make it a different kind of experience than other comics.  Almost every character had their own font ranging from Asterios' mother's cursive to Hana's tiny cute letters.  And all of the side character that were only in there for a few pages-- like the man who used to work at the car place-- were completely fleshed out.  Asterios overall wasn't really a nice guy, I mean I think he meant well but he got caught up in the fact that he seemed to know TOO much.  I've met some people like this myself and after awhile they can get to be really taxing.  Everyone else was very quirky in terms on every character seemed interesting and had their own likes and dislikes.  They weren't carbon copies of each other or anything.

I actually expected this comic to go a completely different direction from where it went.  I was somehow expecting Asterios to meet his brother or switch places with his brother or something, since Ignazio was the narrator.  I mean the constant nightmares Asterios had were creepy to say the least, but  I think that could've gone somewhere since that was never fully explained.  It's kind of like giving someone half a cookie. I want the whole cookie, not just morsels.

The sudden ending of this comic seriously almost gave me a heart attack.  I realize that the end of the world was eluded to throughout the comic through other characters, especially the man in the cafe, but it seriously threw me off in a bad kind of way.  It's like when you are doing theater improv and someone pulls out a gun in the game and it throws everyone off.  It kind of threw off most of the slow build for the comic and left the reader reeling.  

And another thing I wanted to mention that was a little bit odd was Asterios' design.  I really liked his face design and how his face was basically one curvy swoop, it was super appealing and also reflected his hard nature.  

Buddha and Scott Pilgrim and Millennium Actress

This week I read some Buddha.

A lot of this comic reflected a bunch of motifs I have seen in a most Japanese manga/anime I have watched.  First of all, in a lot of early anime in particular, there is a lot of violence against women and children.  I mean, in this comic a man is whipping a boy and his mother because the goods got stolen.  There was also an episode of Speed Racer where a man was whipping a car and then was whipping his daughter because he didn't want her to ride in Speed's car--and that one got banned in the US.  Secondly, there is no filter.  Everybody regardless of age or gender gets slapped and/or punched.  This is Japan.  They have tentacle porn, shojun, manga, anime, otakus, the works.  I mean I just read a page where these kids peed on this one kid and he punched them all in the gonads.  Sometimes I just question why there are some things in manga and anime, but then I just go with it because you might as well.  

Another interesting thing that the Japanese have in their work is an acute connection with the environment/nature.  In this comic in particular there is the sense of the connection between Tatta and the tiger and other people and their interactions with animals.  This goes way back to the Japanese belief in harmony and zen, they respect nature.  This is different from the Eastern side of this, our side, where we strive to master nature rather than live with it. What I really like about Japanese manga is that people seem to become friends really quickly, it's like once people have a common view they are thick as thieves.  

There are a lot of aspects of Speed Racer in this manga, I mean, they are both Osamu Tezuka, and you can really tell in particular pages 48-49 with the classic stretched torso pose and implied violence from the multiple "BAM"s written across the next page.  One of the kids in this comic looked just like Astro Boy, he almost had the same face and hair, I think his name was Tatta.  This comic in particular has a lot of sound effects for movement.  I was reading one page where there was an army coming in and the entire thing was just: Booms, Snaps, Rumbles, Gallops, and Phoofs.

I've also seen Millennium Actress as well as basically every other film Satoshi Kon has made.  When he died I was seriously heartbroken. I really like Paprika and Perfect Blue better as films because they explore the psyche more and had a lot more of a unique flavor to them: I mean in Paprika you are running around in a circus like dream world where anything goes and Perfect Blue leads you down a rabbit hole where you question the main character's sanity.  I would say Millennium Actress is the tamer of the bunch.  I have only seen this movie once because it was kind of repetitive to me after awhile of always running and searching for someone.  I think this film does give a very good sense of Japan more so than the other two just because there is so much of the things Setsuko Hara that explore the past genres of Japanese history.  And this movie in particular really weaves seamlessly through her past and her present and takes the two interviewers with her.

I've also read all of Scott Pilgrim as well as seen the movie which was actually a really good representation of the book, which I wasn't expecting.  I think the most exciting thing about this comic was that Scott Pilgrim was like one of those 8bit games.  I mean, I am not a gamer myself, but it really had an appeal all to its own because nobody had really done that before.  You get extra lives just like a game, and there are different bosses and it makes sense as you are reading it, it's not jarring at all.  And Scott Pilgrim seemed like a real story about this guy in Canada.  And it's cheeky as hell.  There's a guy with Vegan powers and this comic has probably the best collection of one liners ever.   My favorite line from the comic would have to be

Scott: "What's the website of amazon.ca?" 

Wallace: "Amazon.ca?"

The comic is snarky and sarcastic and it really stands out to me. I don't really read copious amounts of comics on my own because books are more appealing to me.  And at the same time I really don't have time with the amount of coursework as a senior CA, but I made time to read all of the books freshman year because they were so goddamn appealing and fun to read.  

Wide World of Comics

 For this week I read some of Persepolis and some of the Blacksad comics.

I looked forever to find a Blacksad comic online because I saw one panel of it and couldn't take my eyes off of it.  The Blacksad comics were so beautiful to look at in general, the detail given to each panel was just mind boggling, I mean you could see every wine bottle on a shelf and every leaf on each bush.  And I've been to New Orleans and it got to one panel and I recognized the panel as one of the restaurants there that I've seen pictures of.  I really like the range of emotions that the characters had.  It seems in a lot of comics with animals it is either condemned to still movements with little or no exaggeration.  Guarnido really knows how to work his characters to keep it looking lifelike a realistic.
And some of the panels just were simply gorgeous like this one:

Even without any narration or dialogue you understand exactly what is going on, plus you get a sense of this character.  You don't wanna mess with this guy he is dangerous.  And all of the characters in Blacksad were almost all different animals and breeds and every character really used that characterization associated with that animal.  I mean there were cats, ferrets, dogs, bears, horses penguins, goats, and the list goes on.  A lot of research went into this.  Like one panel I was looking at there was a polar bear orator roaring and you just knew that that guys gonna be trouble.  And Blacksad uses his catlike reflexes: he stalks and trails people and remains basically unfazed and aloof the rest of the time.

This comic really reminded me of the web comic Lackadaisy (http://www.lackadaisycats.com/).  They are very alike in terms of detail and characterization.  Plus they both have a very rich sense of environment with Lackadaisy's Jazz Age speakeasies and New Orleans' old wrought iron buildings, which both give each comic a unique old flavor.  And it really does read like one of those dark mystery books, I really enjoyed it.

           Persepolis was an interesting read since there isn't a lot of writing I have found about Iran, especially a comic at that.  I was glad that the comic followed her as a kid because I think otherwise it would be hard for me to understand what was going on since there was such a large political influx going on.  It did give a nice unbiased view: I mean we are seeing this as Marji sees it and it was good to see both views on what is going on and really see what was going on through that war with the common people.
          I really liked her dream sequences where someone would be saying something about her grandpa or something and the next minute in her mind she would see him as a sort of king with a crown and everything. It reminded me alot of Blankets and how that wove in and out of reality.

King Comic

For this week I read King by Ho Che Anderson.

This comic actually reminded me a lot of a movie I saw called the Virgin Suicides because it had a similar type of multiple person narrator.  While it did give an interesting insight to different kind of perspective on things, this type of narration always tripped me up because the way it moves from one person to another.  It's almost like I finally get something to grab onto, and we're onto the next person's thoughts.  I mean, the comic gave you an almost godlike vantage of everything, but at the same time you were left wanting because you didn't know one person's whole belief.  All you have is pieces of everything.  And in King, these opinions were not always positive and a lot of the views weren't what you were expecting.    I mean, the first time you see him in the comic he's trying to steal food. I was like whattt is going onnnnn.  This is just degrading.  It would be degrading to anyone.  It's not the normal picture you would be expected to be painted of Martin Luther King.

The beginning was very in your face.  It was like a bunch of short subjects of people doing crazy things.  My favorite line would have to be "...jungle bunny share-cropping twelve sandwich eating..." because that is just ridiculous.

There were a lot of Christian overtones throughout this comic.  Especially one page where MLK was talking to his wife and there was like a down view of him on his bed and there was like an intense contrast of King looking at the cross with half of his face in shadow and the cross had like intense lighting on it so it almost looked threatening.  It reminded me of that famous picture of the two people who were sharecroppers with the cross in the background, the American Gothic.

Most of the non-African Americans in this book were not really shown in the best light, for lack of a better word.  I mean, what was it--the second page where there were a bunch of hoodlums yelling about Chinks and something else.  It kind of took the idea of the racist Southern person of the time and ramped it up 100%.  I think the page with the old lady on the bus who says hello to the driver and angrily mutters niggers to all the black people in the back was a good example of that.  It's still true today as well my grandma thinks black people are lazy and don't do anything even after all these years.

MAUS

This comic really read almost like a book.  It was really easy to get hooked on reading it.  The characters themselves were so lifelike and real.  I love the way his father would just go off the handle for no reason if something wasn't clean or he'd get distracted by something and totally uproot where the story was headed.  And I know that his father was from Poland so he had an accent, but the way he spoke while telling the story like "He survived me my life that time..." made it really interesting in a sort of Yoda-esque way.  It really kept me interested because it wasn't what you normally expect from narration.
And the relationship between the father and the son was so estranged.  It makes sense though, for there to be a rift between two completely different life experiences.  I really liked the coat example, where his father threw out his old coat and gave him that huge coat that was like whale sized.  It really illustrated the gap between them.  I know I have had similar clashes of different viewpoints with my parents because of the generation gap.

I think the comic really wove between the past and present well.  The stark black and white of the comic really gave it a harsh realistic quality. Some of the images really got the sense of despair across like this one.

I really enjoyed reading this graphic novel because it was very true.  Not only was it based on true events, but the ways it was expressed through images was very bold and didn't hold back.  The one that really stood out to me was when the father was talking about what happened to his first son and he said that the soldiers were killing small children in another place nearby and the German's swung the kids by their legs against a wall and "they never anymore screamed".  It was just a good piece of writing and almost bone chilling.  And there was a very good balance between the writing and the actual panels.  It flowed really well in terms of images and things said.  I think it would have been easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of words in the actual story, but I was wrong.

I believe that this novel in particular harkens back to Scott McCloud's comment on how we can easily put ourselves in the shoes of a character if they are more cartoony.  And I think it really worked because they weren't drawn to be overly funny looking or deliberately cute.  I think the comic would've lost something, had he taken it any other route, because the story is so serious.  He made them vulnerable and the whole, cat-Nazis and mice-Jews really amped that up.
   This comic in particular really reminded me of The Grave of Fireflies just because both conveyed the terrible actions that happened during those horrible times with such a sense of reality.  The Grave of Fireflies describes the destruction of this family during the bombings during WW2.  And Maus really showed the Holocaust as it was without any cuteness and/or refinement.  These were both horrific events and I think that the people that wrote this comic and did the movie showed what happened truthfully and that is really important.

Underground Comics!

        This week I read Robert Crumb's "The Religious Experience of Phillip K. Dick", Girl Fight Comics, and Tits and Clits.  What I kind of took away from all of this reading was that these comics in particular  were made to entertain through any means necessary.  They aren't probably the best drawn comics and some of them were a little painful to look at in terms of anatomy and posing.  I am a fan of rock and roll so this was right up my ally.  In lack of a better word, David Bowie approves.

       I originally started reading the Phillip K. Dick comic because I am super fond of Dick's sci fi work and Blade Runner is my favorite movie because the way it looks at the human condition.  It was not what I was expecting at all actually, I never realized that Phillip K. Dick was influenced by such a strong sense of interesting psychosis concerning Christianity.  The comic itself was a little bit dry since it was literally an interview that was illustrated to show what Dick went thru.  A lot of it was very stiffly drawn in static poses, but the words kept me very interested because of the subject matter.  The images were very stark and I think it really worked with the biblical undertones to create a surreal reality.  I do think the drawings did get across the ideas that Dick was trying to portray.  And I don't think that I would have understood what Dick felt without the comic as well.  It was such a visual story that it almost needed to give you a picture to look at, and it was interesting to see Crumb's take on it.

         I adored Girl Fight Comics because it was super girl power with a lot of sass.  In general, this comic reminded me of the pulp fiction novels.  Lot's of sex, violence, and action.  In the first comic I read things were just happening so fast I was left spinning. Fox wakes up and kills a man she slept with disrespects her so she stabs him.  And that's just on the first page.  Then she meets a women army that apparently inform her that she has lost her memories and she's from Africa.  And then sex randomly happens and it's back to Africa, where she bumps her head and loses her memories again.  And she ends up saving her father's tribe.  It's so bad that it's good.  And I mean, this comic was made for men.  Any excuse for a Tarzan-esque bikini or that Amazonian queen who was wearing some sort of bathing suit with the boob part cut out.  I enjoyed it because it didn't degrade women.  Although there was rape and it was still a man's world, women were portrayed with strong characters.  And in lack of a better phrase, they kicked ass.  I kind of even felt bad for some of the men as I was reading because they kept being beat up.  And the one man that didn't get beat up, the poor guy inside the tomb, he unfortunately disintegrated, which is probably just as well because he was going to get raped probably in a few minutes.  All the rest of the men were liars, cheats, and most of them ended up black and blue if not stabbed.        
      It reminded me a lot of pulp fiction novels of the time.  There was no time wasted in this comic and there was always something happening in a BAM-BAM-BAM sort of way.  There was no down time. Everything was very harsh and surprising.

          I read Tits and Clits because I felt like because this title was kind of awesome.  I mean, there was the Bosomic Woman with huge tits and she defeated a man with her silver disco outfit.  If that doesn't cry '70s and David Bowie I don't know what did.  This comic was just so entertaining I kept dying laughing and I'm pretty sure my roommate thought I was possessed.  I mean, his muscles blinded her. WHY DON'T COMICS TODAY HAVE THAT? It was so beautiful.  Most of Tits and Clits kind of looked like it was drawn by a drunk third grader.  Some of it was just kind of weird, like the one of Jehana and this guy wanted to have his way with her so I created an imp to befriend her.  And then the imp and her started to have sex, but then Jehana realized it was an imp.  Next thing you know the imp burst into flames. The End. I was like, wait that's it? Ok then. And some of it was pure sex like the woman and the amphibian man. But the stories were very charming and very cheeky.

Ze Graphic Novel

For this week I read Will Eisner's Contract with God and Blankets.

First of all, I really enjoyed reading Contract with God.  Eisner really knew how to work a panel and pose his characters to make a scene as expressive as possible.  It was just so appealing to look at and all the characters were really fleshed out and you really got a good gist of who they were.  Like the one comic of the Super guy who was the angry landlord and was constantly yelling and being grumpy pants.  It was amazing to me that these stories were all based on true stories, but they were all so DEPRESSING. For example, the Hasidic jew lost his daughter and then kind of went downhill, ok maybe really downhill.  And the Super story was kind of creepy I wasn't expecting that kind of turn of events.  And the alley singer was just really sad in terms of being at the lowest of the low and losing your one beacon of hope.  My favorite panels would have to be the first few pages of him walking in the rain they were just so beautiful and really got the heart-wrenching mood across. It literally almost looked like the pages were melting and it was gorgeous.  Eisner's environments in particular were so lifelike that even without the blurb in the beginning about how the graphic novel was based on tenement living in the 1930s, it would have read as that time period.  

I mean, some of the comic was a bit racey like the ones we read last week.  There was some negative Jewish remarks, okay maybe a lot of them.  And when the alley singer slapped the baby out of his wife's hands I was like WHAT IS GOING ON. And then he was slapping the wife and I was like SOMEBODY STOP THIS MADMAN HE'S ON A ROLL.

I have conflicting thoughts on Blankets.  I liked reading it, it was a really quick and easy to get through since it flowed so well.  I mean, I read it in one night.  I really liked the surreal aspects of the comic and how the pages seemed to weave between reality and the sort of dreamy-like world. What I didn't like was the story was kind of long winded.  It kind of reminded me of reading Interview with a Vampire for the Lit Horror class,  the character of Louis in particular.  Like Louis' whining, it was very long winded.  Sometimes I felt like we were getting nowhere in the story, it was like you were constantly hitting a wall.  It was just really slow and lots of angst concerning the main character. Pages and pages of angst.

Unfortunately, it was kind of hard for me to stay interested in the whole Christian motif throughout the story.  But I do think Craig's characters were really fleshed out, it was just an overflow of angst on behalf of his relationship. 

A Brief History of Ze Comic Book

This week I read Jack Cole and the Plastic Man, Tin Tin, and some of Bark's Uncle Scrooge and the Pygmy Indians.

Plastic Man was adorable.  It kind of reminded me of that really old Batman tv show that had really bad jokes and there was a still of Batman slapping Robin and it was really over the top.

It seems like it really developed the idea for the creation of Mr. Fantastic in Fantastic Four, since they both basically had the same creation story.  Plastic Man sure had some great one liners like "Why, that inhuman rat!!" I was really into the pace of it until I got to the whole backstory about the kid with the blue eyes. And then it was like his father killed his mother and he lost his ability to talk and his father would beat him and then people tarred his father and then he was adopted and then sold back to his father? Like what? It was like 5 twists at once and it took up like a page or two to even describe the whole thing and it kind of left me reeling.  It was very bizarre, I wasn't expecting that.  I mean, they had a villian who could make you cry he was so sad looking.  And the first bad guy got his head caught in a bear trap!  It was very entertaining and took some very unexpected turns as I was reading it.


I really enjoyed Tin Tin.  I saw part of the movie and the whole motion capture animation combo thing really did not work for me.  It was really unsettling for me to watch, it just looked wrong.  But the comic itself does read very much like an animation.  Not a lot is left up to chance and basically you follow the characters from one place to another and it is very thorough as far as conversations and interactions with other characters goes. I didn't realize how much detail went into this comic in particular, all of the locations and the different types of dress that people wore was really well done.  A lot of research went into this piece.  Some of the things did seem a little racey though.  I mean in the Tin Tin comic I read they were looking for someone named Chang Chon-Chen.  I mean, I really had to wince at that one.  A friend of mine said she had one of the Tin Tin comics and they even had a guy in blackface.

First of all the Uncle Scrooge comic was very cute and very Disney.  And by that I mean, it was for methods of teaching with Scrooge always being shown by his nephews how to do the right thing.  And very G rated. God forbid we actually show someone actually getting hit by an arrow or something.  It was kind of highly predictable and once again, a little on the racey side as far as the Indians part.  I think what this comic had going for it that was really good was the poses, everything just flows really nicely.  If I was little I would have really enjoyed this because it has the same high quality of a regular Disney animation.

The Amazing Comic Strip!

For this week I read Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbs, Little Nemo, and Hark! A Vagrant.  It was really interesting to me because I used to read the comics section of my newspaper at home pretty religiously.

        I'd never read Calvin and Hobbs before.  I always thought it was some male-ego comic thing because all I have seen of it were Calvin making weird faces and those stickers on trucks of Calvin peeing on a logo. So I always assumed it was just it was just a lot of drivel.  But I was proved wrong and I actually loved Calvin and Hobbs.  I loved the way the panels switched between Hobbs being a real tiger and a stuffed animal.  It just made sense, I mean what kid hasn't thought that of their stuffed animals as real people?  I know I did, so it was really easy to put myself in Calvin's shoes.  Calvin and Hobbs reminds me a lot of Peanuts, I mean they are both driven by real life events. But while Peanuts goes for the more dry sarcasm more adults can relate to, Calvin and Hobbs seems more aimed at what things kids do.  Don't get me wrong, I love Peanuts, but that comic could be so depressing and the other half of the time I barely had a reaction at all.  Like I'd read it and I'd be like, ok. Wait, that's the end?  It was a lot less punch-line driven and more, this is the bare bones of life we deal with. Sometimes it just isn't that funny.
         
          Little Nemo was very much akin to Prince Valiant.  I tried to read Prince Valiant when I was younger, but it only came out on Sundays and it was like reading molasses.  I tried to convince myself I had to read it because for some reason I thought grown ups only read the long saga comics like Rex Morgan M.D. and Prince Valiant.  There were so many different characters and I felt like I was getting nowhere, so I gave up. It was very slow moving but very highly rendered.  Not exactly my style.  It was literally like a fully complete illustration per panel!  When I got to the panels with all the snowmen having a snowball fight I was literally blown away by the attention to detail.

And what is this panel. Like I was reading and then there were pirates being attacked by the good guys and this qwoping drawing happened. And I was like... what? How does human body work? HOW DOES PHYSICS? I cried a little on the inside when I saw this one.

I'd have to say Hark! A Vagrant was my favorite.  I mean, they were hilarious.  I was reading them in the library and I had to stop myself from dying laughing on some of them.  And they were so minimal and clean and nice to look at, three panels and boom you are done and there is a payoff.  I mean some were longer, but they were very fast and easy to read.  I liked it how a lot of her comics were history based or based on books.  When I got to the Gatsby ones with the baby jokes I almost died. It was fabulous!  I mean, they weren't as higly detailed as Nemo, but it was really concise.  Although there weren't really any reoccuring characters that I saw in the pages I read, it was still really easy to relate to.

And my favorite comic of hers was a tie between the David Bowie comic and the chicken comic because they were just so obvious that it made the joke 10 times more hilarious.

Understanding Comics

So I remember this was assigned once as reading for a different class and I really tried to read it.  Unfortunately I ended up glossing over it because it was too much for my brain to process.  But this time, I got through it.  I know it is kind of upsetting but I find it terribly hard to get through this comic in particular.  I mean the information you get out of it is really helpful, but for me it is kind of like reading a dictionary.  In my opinion, it just reads like a textbook. I feel like he explains things like three times.  Like the transitions between different comic panels. He explained it once and had the little examples and I was like okay that makes total sense.  I never thought about it like that before.  And then he showed a few examples in real comics and I was like alright other artists use this too, okay.  And then I hit the  part with the bar graphs I was just like NOOOO. STOP. STOP NOW.  And they kept going! It was like three pages of tiny bar graphs. And I know I'm probably overreacting because they did illustrate a point but still.  I don't want to see that many bar graphs. No one does. And no one should have to explain something four times. My reaction:

And when he was defining comics in the beginning I kind of wanted to slap things. It was just very drawn out. And I felt like we weren't getting anywhere.  I guess it's one of those things where you you look at a chair and then you have a definition of a chair and then like you end up farther away from what you were originally striving to get to (the chair).

But I really do think McCloud's writings really hit home on a lot of points that really aren't usually brought to light.  I really liked the comment about Japanese comics and how they tend to be more lengthy and more about the journey than the destination.  I think that is completely true, I've read some Japanese comics and that is completely true, especially of manga like Naruto that literally is still going after 615 pages strong and no nearer to any part of total resolution.

And I do think that this was very entertaining to read.  Anytime I would get bored of the lengthy explanations, there was always something to look at and I agree, his simply designed main character was very easy to follow rather than a hyper realistically rendered character.  When I got to the part about how we see faces in everything I just think about how I used to see faces in my blankets.  I still do and its weird.  I liked how his character seemed to walk through the different motions of everything he was explaining, it was very surreal and frankly, it kept me hooked (as long as there were no bar graphs or lengthy explanations)

The Arrival has arrived. YEH!

         I’ve seen this comic before but I’ve never had the chance to read it thru. I think The Arrival really shows how you can get a story across without any words.  We forget how much we rely on language to get thru our daily lives.  But the comic still makes sense, you understand what is going on through gestures, patterns, and shape recognition.  I mean, I didn’t even have to read this twice to understand what was going on.  You just really had to pay attention to the information the characters were relaying back and forth to each other.  Everything was important so you really couldn’t skim the pages because you might miss an important gesture.    

I think Shaun Tan really did a great job on this plot-wise.  I mean he’s created a whole new world with different stories interwoven.  And it makes sense.  I mean, the pacing was slow, but I think it worked because of the high amount of detailed information you had to take in from certain panels.  It kind of worked as a breather, and it helped flow into the next segment of panels.  I mean there was an entire double page of 60 clouds.  You don’t usually see something like that in popular comics.  But the clouds were lovely to look at and they did give a feeling of time passing and repetition.  Plus, Tan used similar imagery later for when the husband woke up and saw his new creature-pet on his bed.

         This comic really reminded me of immigration to the Americas and Ellis Island.  It was interesting how each of the characters the husband met had similar stories about some form of oppression or evil entity that drove them to assimilate in this new location.  Also, I liked it how the story ended up going full circle.  The husband started out not understanding the language of the new land but he learned where to sleep, how to get food, he got a job, made friends, and it ends with him reuniting with his family.  His daughter passes on this knowledge to someone new that has to go on a similar path.  It’s like the circle of life, but with language (and no Simba).

         I really love the panels for this comic.  They look like photographs or little worn out postcards.  Each of the images in the strip are so highly detailed and his sweeping environments are breathtaking.  He really knows how to use light and shadow in his work to make a place seem scary or inviting.  And the panels really flowed together well.  Some of them read almost like an animation to me, like the old man’s story about being in the war and losing his leg.