Week 15, Anya's Ghost revised

     

     This week I read Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol. I didn't know what to expect when I picked this work up, I just picked it because I wanted something visually interesting and fun to read. This book luckily satisfied that need very well. I loved the art style and the whimsicality of the whole story.

      The story follows Anya, a high schooler living in New England somewhere. She falls into a hole on the way to school and find bones, which happen to be linked to a ghost. She talks to the ghost and befriends her for a while and promises to help find her killer. As the story progresses, Anya find out that the ghost, Emily, was not murdered and was actually a murderer who died while trying to escape.

     The art reminded me of some modern gothic literature, as well as a slight resemblance to Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim. Anya is as normal of a high school unpopular kid as you can find, and I quite enjoyed this because I am familiar with that point of view and related to it. I couldn't stop reading and was happy when I finished the book because I loved the story, but I wanted to read more. I think what really made me enjoy this book was how similar the storytelling and art was to Craig Thompson’s Blankets, which was probably my favorite thing I read this semester along with this book. The simple yet emotive art and the minimal dialog made for a pleasant and involved read.

Week 14 The 21st century

        This week was incredibly appealing to me because when I saw the suggested and required reading, two works that I was already a huge fan of were in the list. Those were Jhonen Vasquez's Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Nicholas Gurewitch's Perry Bible Fellowship.

I think the main reason I was drawn to these works years ago, was their ability to use cute and funny drawings or ideas and make them over the top dark and disturbing. My oldest brother who is 10 years older than me introduced me to JTHM (by accident, because when I say he introduced me, I mean he left the Z? book out and I looked through it at a very young age.) I discovered PBF at a rather young age of about 13, most likely a few years before the ideal target audience.
 
     Perry Bible fellowship uses minimal words and very limited paneling and still tells a small story. What sets both PBF  apart from many comics, is that their isn't a huge over arching story, and every comic is a one shot. This is the case with many webcomics, but not all. I used to read a webcomic called Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques, which has had a steady narrative with the same and new characters since 2003. For the most part, QC has been put up every day, which is an incredible feat.

     JTHM has some aspects of this one shot property, because other than the fact that Johnny keeps coming back, after his first break in and meeting with Squee, all the stories are individual. Many of the stories in JTHM don't even involve him and are just random strange and disturbing thought strips.

Week 13: superheroes revisited

   

     

     I have always been a huge fan of modern super heroes in comics, but specifically the ones with good stories. When I went to the book store of comic shop, I would always try to find the best art and stories in comics and read them and study them. This week I read Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum and also a few issues of the Vertigo comic Fables.

     To start off, Arkham Asylum is easily one of the most beautiful comics I have ever seen and the art is beyond twisted and terrifying. For being a Batman comic, it was not very heavy on him, but for this book, he is not the most important character. The main story that interweaves is the story of Amadeus Arkham and how after a successful career and creation of the asylum, he eventually goes completely crazy. The book is incredibly cerebral and psychological and the depiction of the main villains is nightmarish. In terms of stories, it is rare to find one as good as this one. Many books are very shallow and too action oriented, and some others are just downright confusing. I remember I read another of Morrison's books: Final Crisis.

      Many people, myself included are incredibly confused and sometimes upset with Final Crisis. It's the type of book that after you finish it you put it down and say "what the hell did I just read." The same thing happens while you are reading as well. While the story of Final Crisis is good at heart, it is so confusing and has way too many plots that eventually it just becomes an endurance challenge of trying to figure out the plot.

Promethia by Alan Moore

                              
       Promethia in comic lives inside the "Immateria," a sort of plane of existence inhabited by the gods. She is able to leave and inhabit the imaginations of mortals in the physical realm and manifest herself into a physical form through their imagination. There is a reoccurring symbol of rebirth and manifestation through stories, and how stories are eternal. The comic itself likens Promethia to a story and how a story can be so special that it finds a way to come back over and over again. The idea of rebirth through stories to fight back darkness, much like the Smee that attacks the main character before she becomes Promethia, is quite common and stories can often times fight darkness and sadness.

     I was able to connect with the idea of the eternal story and how darkness can be driven away by a powerful and bright one. The story itself is only just unfolding, so many of the elements are still very new to me. In terms of connecting to a character, I felt the most connection with the original Promethia who lost her father to religious extremists. She wanders the dessert and tries to find the gods that her Father promised would protect her after he sent her away. Since her story was shorter than the main character's, the was more to relate to for me, but I'm sure if I kept reading, I would grow to like the main woman.


I think the most appropriate medium to use, if Promethia were ever adapted, would be a series of animated featured. While reading, I could not imagine the story as a live action movie, especially based on how much would have to be cut. I think a series of episodic animations, much like Bruce Timm's Batman cartoon would work much better, adapting each comic into an episode. This also lends itself to the way that the story is presented, switching between the real and the imagined, as well as the fact that it changes time frame a few times. The ability to stretch and show the same information on screen, such as when She is being told by Barbara about past Promethias, or when she is writing to try to get the Promethia spirit to transfer, would greatly benefit the story and preserve the same vision that Alan Moore wanted. I don't think I would make any changes other than to make sure that what needed to be told would fit into the format, but I don't think anything would be cut.

week 12 Anya's Ghost

This week I read Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol. I didn't know what to expect when I picked this work up, I just picked it because I wanted something visually interesting and fun to read. This book luckily satisfied that need very well. I loved the art style and the whimsicality of  the whole story. I also enjoyed the point of view from which it was told and how Anya was the underdog and kind of cool loser, sometimes how I like to classify myself actually. The story follows Anya, a high schooler living in New England somewhere. She falls into a hole on the way to school and find bones, which happen to be linked to a ghost. She talks to the ghost and befriends her for a while and promises to help find her killer. As the story progresses, Anya finds out that the ghost, Emily, was not murdered and was actually a murderer who died while trying to escape.

The art reminded me of some modern gothic literature, as well as a slight resemeblence to Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim. Anya is as normal of a high school unpopular kid as you can find, and I quite enjoyed this because I am familiar with that point of view and related to it. I couldn't stop reading and was happy when I finished the book because I loved the story, but I kept wanting to read more.

Week 11

     This week I read The Fountain, based upon the original script by Darren Aronofsky, which would be turned into a movie a few years later. I remember hearing about the movie years ago, but have little to no recollection of the plot because I wasn't allowed to watch movies when it came out. I didn't realize there was a comic of it and I was even more surprised to hear that it predated the movie.

     First of all, the book was wonderfully painted and expressed the fantastical and spiritual story perfectly. The story is told with three simultaneous story lines using the same main character, and the one in the 1500s directly affects the otherworldly, spiritual story of the dying tree of life hurtling through space. The complexity and maturity of the story coupled with the art was fresh in a literary genre that sometimes falls short in the thinking power of the work. The Fountain really reads like respectable piece of literature and I cannot recommend it enough. 

Interestingly enough, after I finished reading The Fountain, I decided to watch the trailer of the movie and they were nearly identical. I cannot speak for how the book translates to movie as a whole, but it seems that since they use the same script, they are comparable to each other.   

Week 10: Japanese comics

     This week I read a selection of 3 different works that were all rather different from each other. The work I was most familiar with was Death note, one of the two Manga I had ever read before, the other being Naruto ( you can tell I never had a serious manga phase.) The other two I read  this week was Battle Alita and Buddha Vol. 1. 

      Based on my limited and brief experience with Manga, I can uncover a few common threads between all of the works I have read and read this week. There are no shortages of speech bubbles and dialog within all works, and that is especially true whenever there is emotion. This is coupled with the ways that emotion and action are conveyed. All action and reaction is highly emphasized and exaggerated to show while telling. However, there is not always a huge amount of speech bubbles and dialog. On the contrary, one of the most unique things I have found in opposition of most western comics, is that there can be much more "silent frames" in Manga. Mostly in Battle Alita and Buddha, there were prolonged scenes of textless action and visual storytelling. 

     Despite manga often being seen as a kids comic, most that I have read have mature storylines and content. All three works I read had prominent themes about death and pain, something that while mentioned in western comics, is very rarely this prominent.