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.