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. 

Week 9: Tank Girl

   

This week I read a few comics, including revisiting some Asterix from my childhood. But the one I was to talk about is Tank Girl. I already knew a little bit about tank girl, but had never actually read the comics. I also had the fortune/misfortune, depending on how you look at it, of seeing the movie, which while it did a pretty great job of portraying Tank Girl how she acts in the comics, was overall a bad movie.

     The comic at first glance is incredibly colorful and very easy to read. The writing is written to mimic Tank Girl's and the rest of the world's slang and speech. The art is very vibrant and is quite inviting. The overall themes are very often very raunchy and slobbish, but not to the point of grossness. The specific series I read was about Tank Girl being pregnant, so it was very interesting to see her character deal with something as serious as pregnancy, while Booga, her boyfriend kind of just partied non-stop in excitement.
    As far as it being an international comic, it is not as foreign as some which are translated from a foreign language or written by an immigrant, but there is still a distinctly Australian and English flair. Booga appears to be an anthropomorphic version of a kangaroo, most likely the most cliche thing Alan Grant or one of the other writers could come up with to poke fun at a post apocalyptic Australia.

Stereotypes and sexism in Games and comics

 Considering I am a Game Art Major, my speciality is video games, but since I am also a long time Licensed comic reader, I will also have some of that in my post.


Gender in videogames seems to be the most common and hotly debated topic about stereotypes. I will not deny that there are some cases in videogames where females are made to be lesser people, in most cases by sexualisation and lack of physical power. The problem I have when someone outright says that all games are misogynistic and demeaning to women and all women in games are sex object, is that this only applies to a portion of the industry, and becomes less and less true over time.

Tomb raider as a series began as a game where you went around as a woman in crimially short shorts and massive breasts and each game seemed to push the boundary more until a certain point, the modern remake of the game, simply called Tomb Raider. Here is the change in character model form the beginning of the series, and then the current game. The difference is rather large while still preserving the character.

He proportions are normalised, her clothes are real clothes, she has grime on her, and she comes across as a human. She still has sex appeal, but instead of being a parody of reality, she is sexy in the incredibly badass strong woman sense. 

Believe it or not, males have just as much, and in some cases more stereotyping in games, Nearly all games I have played had large manly men with large guns who could fight through literal hell to save the world. It is becoming more common in the gaming industry for both genders to be addressed and written as humans and not chunks of flesh. When people say females are misrepresented in games, I agree, but I will only agree if they also realise men are also suffering from the same problem. 

Now to address comics, mainly the licensed charaters such as DC and Marvel, since I've been a super hero junkie since I could read. These two companies of comics have actually more problems in balance than games do in terms of sterotypes. Women tend to  be drawn in rather skimpy clothing and many times are in rather seductive poses. However, in the same way I think of games, very few men in comics have anything less than massive muscles and perfect hair. Race sterotypes are also present; Cyborg was a star black football player with father issues, for some stupid reason the first mulim green lantern, while not being the first black one, carried a handgun, Jubilee, who is chinese had the underwhelming power of fireworks, all caCanadianseem to have a connection to animals, the russians are still evil and are all soviets etc. Some of these aren't completely bad, but they still force races into niches. When comics try to change something completely, they try to make a big deal about it: Thor's a woman! Earth 2 Green lantern is Gay! Power lantern is a latina woman now!

One thing that goes back to people talking about how all women in comics seem to be super sexy and in seductive poses and it's there to please the men. I have to counter with something that is way more prevalent, yet so similar to the example I am about to present, it would be stupid not to mention it. 

Recently, there was a huge uproar that spiderwoman had her ass up in the air and had a costume that was essentially body paint.

1. Nearly all super heroes have skin tight costumes that leave nothing to the imagination.

2. If spiderwoman in this pose is such a problem. 

How is this at all any better, considering Nicki Minaj has an exponetially larger audience of viewership compared to a varient cover of Spiderwoman

This week I read Art Spielgelman's Maus 1&2. I remember always seeing this book in the bookstore when I bought my Dark Horse Star Wars comics, and being intrigued by the cover, but figuring that the content was a little too mature for my preteen age. It was less the violent and dark themes that wouldn't mesh well with my young age, and more the fact that I would not have appreciated how much gravitas the entire story holds. I really enjoyed how the story was told using the animals as representations of the different races of people as well as how it was a story told by Art's father.

Despite the fact that I am part Jewish, I really don't know a huge amount about the holocaust, but what I know, I learned from a huge book on world war 2 that had photos of concentration camps. Maus gave me what seemed like a very accurate representation of exactly what it was like from beginning to end. I remember a Holocaust survivor visited my high school and the story he told us was incredibly similar to the storyline of Maus. The use of animals made the story a lot easier to take in, and was very helpful to easily distinguish the Jews(mice) from my Germans (cats).

The story worked very well using the graphic novel as the method of conveyance, because the pace was changed based on the density of the text combined with the detail of the drawings. Traditional writing would not have given the story justice, mostly because of how much Vladek's story is image based, told as a story, Maus is how he is imagining it in the moment.

Underground Comix

     This week in my expedition into the literature of comics lead me to what may some of the strangest and most offensive works of the graphic narrative I have ever read; Underground Comix. As a start to my evening, I watched Terry Zwillgof's 1994 movie Crumb. I also read selections of Zap comix, Mr Natural and Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. I think I liked Zap Comix the most because I liked the varying types of work in it and some of the strange humor. Most of this week's selection was raunchy to a point of mild discomfort. 

   Most of Underground comix are highly sexual and rife with not only drug references, but actual drug use. Accompanying these themes, in one strip of Mr. Natural, Mr Natural receives fellatio from an adult sized baby in graphic detail...twice. Most of Crumb's most famous work is highly sexualized and gathers huge inspiration from psychedelics such as LSD. Crumb is also best known for his very objectified and large bodied women, who sometime don't even have heads to further their purpose as nothing but a sex toy. His wife said when asked about how she felt about this, that it is only really in his comics, and while he is very sexual, he doesn't have the same ideas in real life as he does in his comics

     In Crumb, one of the subjects that comes up is Crumb's very racist depictions of black people, and he essentially said that he was just using the stereotypes without any hurtful meaning. In an interview, he goes on to say that he used the 1920s sterotypes in a psycadelicized way, and it wasn't meant to represent his view and that it wasn't his job to try to explain it to someone. 

   Crumb's drawing style is incredibly graphic and has very small but heavy use of lines, adding gruesome detail to everything he drew, sometimes using it to further the psychedelic drug feeling, and other times just to enhance his gross sexual illustrations. 

     

The human emotion in narrative

          In both Will Eisner's Contract with God and Craig Thompson's Blankets, the human emotion is pushed with body language and strong dialogue. Facial expressions with dramatic lighting dominate Eisner's piece, and surreal imagery and body language are very present in Blankets. Both of these apply to both works, but I felt the concentration for each was as previous stated. 

  In both, the drama is all human problems, but is made larger by the body language and manner of storytelling. Contract with God is told as a story from the past, made present like a memory being remembered, perhaps in this way, the exaggeration of body and face is pushed to better tell the story. In Blankets, it is told from a first person past tense, but because of the first person POV, the imagery is greatly distorted to fit the character/artist's thoughts. 

     I Connected with Craig on a personal level while reading and had trouble putting down my iPad, which I was reading it from. The story felt so real and personal and I related and felt incredibly close to Craig. His social discomfort and victimization by the bullies reminded me of my middle school and high school life, even extending into my present life at school. I felt for him when he tried to go with the avoidance tactic, rather than confront the bullies, usually imagining them literally eating excrement or dying. On the same emotional level, but lighter and more warm tone, his relationship with Raina when he first visits her in Michigan made me feel the exact emotions and made me miss walking in the snow and falling back into the static snowflake silence that I am so very used to having lived in both Michigan and New York my whole life up until College in Florida.

The comic book

     
     This week I read a selection of mostly Carl Bark's Donald duck, as well as a few stories of from the E.C comics a Crime Suspensestories issue, and a selection of Tin Tin in tibet. The comic book essentially took two paths, in terms of this week's reading. One path was that the same style as the comic strip was extended into a few pages to tell a longer story, but still be as fun, goofy, and overall as brief. The other path was that much longer stories with more serious tones and a significantly larger amount of text was put onto a page. I really enjoyed the simplistic art of Tin Tin combined with the full text and dialog that came with it. It still had some of the fun and exaggerated feeling of comic strips and even some Carl Barks, but had a serious narrative and quirky dialogue.

     The reoccurring situation in Donald Duck, where his nephews  ruin all of Donald's plans or property only go funnier the more I read. The most outrageous one was when Donald volunteers to fly to the moon, but is sabotaged when his 3 nephews weigh down the rocket and they stall on the moon. It was the sort of Comic that would be right at home being animated like Tom and Jerry or Looney Toons.

The comic strip

This week I read an assortment of Little Nemo, Krazy kat, Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts. Both Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts were comics I read when I was growing up. I remember we had all of Bill Watterson's books and collections and I would read and draw different panels, it was such a huge part of me growing up.

All of this week's comics had a few aspects in common, that I had totally forgotten from my experience from Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts. They are told in a short form with a more or less contained story. Some exceptions can be made for Peanuts and Little Nemo, where some strips lead into others, but all seemed to be originally told in a week's time.

While reading Little Nemo, I was reminded a little of Calvin and Hobbes. While Calvin tends to get in trouble and have his adventures in real life and end up with consequences to fit a 6 year old, all of Nemo's mischief takes place in the dream world, and usually wasn't meant to be mischief, but is seen that way. Still, at the end of every strip of Little Nemo in Slumber Land, he has to wake up and have one of his parents yelling at him to go back to sleep or to wake up, effectively giving him consequences similar to Calvin and Hobbes.

Part of the art of the three to four panel comic strip, and in general the short form comic strip extending to one page comics such as Krazy Kat or Little Nemo, is the ability to convey the entire story, or in most cases the joke, in one short set of panels. Because of the length restraint, often the humor becomes very simple, but at the same time so much more unique. Also in many cases, especially common in Calvin and Hobbes, is the introspective, philosophical strips such as when Calvin asks Hobbes if he believes in fate and that everything is pre-determined, and by the end of the four panels, they just shrug off that complex idea as scary.

Understanding comics

One idea that McCloud presented in Understanding Comics that I found very interesting was the concept of “the Gutter,” the space between two panels. He talks about how our brains are always seeking closure, so we interpret halftone dots to become a photograph, or 24 frames per second to become a single moving video. One simple example to visually represent what our mind does between panels is the Kanizsa Triangle.

  

We fill in the blanks.  We interpret separate panels as movement or a change of scenery or situation.  McCloud states there are six types of closure in comics and discusses how there is a pattern to the frequency and specific types of closure used in most any comic, no matter the genre. The most common type is action-to-action, where each frame is a distinct action, as opposed to moment-to-moment, which is 1 singular action broken up, much like film stills. What’s interesting is how even though there are a huge range of genres of comics form all part of the world, they all for the most part follow the same graph where action to action is the majority of panel types.

The second most used type of closure is subject-to-subject, which usually stays within the scene or at least the idea, but is more of key frames that we must piece together. The Arrival by Shaun Tan uses a fair amount of moment-to-moment to convey the main character’s emotion or action, but also uses a large amount of subject-to-subject which we have to deduce what the scene means as a whole.

The third part of the most common closure in comics is scene-to-scene. The is even more work left to the audience than subject-to-subject, where we must guess the entire content of a panel’s scene with only that singular container of information.

There are 2 more types that I haven’t even mentioned, but are not very commonly used, and when they are, most of the time, the comic is very experimental.

The Arrival-By Shaun Tan

The Arrival by Shaun Tan is a strange and fantastic story told only through pictures with no text. It is very successful in telling a cohesive and well-detailed story despite the lack speech or story text. When I first started, I was skeptical that it was possible to tell a completely understandable story with no text. I had seen plenty of stories told only through pictures, but this story was a whole new experience.

The reason The Arrival is so successful in its storytelling is the visual language and close attention to the main character’s emotions and facial expressions. One of the first things that became apparent, which differed from the modern comic or graphic novel, which I am used to, is the way time is represented in each panel. When words are used to tell the story, the panel’s story can progress with no visual explanation of what happened the way that The Arrival does. On the second page of the story, when the main character wraps his family photo, every step of his action is shown throughout the nine separate panels to show the exact progression of the action. The same technique is used when he is on the boat in a slightly different way. The length of his journey to the new land is illustrated by the changing sky; progressing multiple time from dusk onto night, into the dawn and day, all the way back to the night again. The visual storytelling here is very similar to the way that films represent the same sort of idea. The reader understands exactly what is going on without having to read text.

Another way that The Arrival is able to tell the reader the story is by showing the main character’s reactions, actions and gestures as a way of explaining what would normally be a text bubble.  His facial expressions are much more visible than a standard comic and we are able to read his feelings and troubles. Although the story is monochromatic, the color still changes for multiple reasons: sometimes to show the time of day or illumination of the scenery, The most prominent and powerful use of the color change, is when the old man is telling his story of being young and traveling as a soldier. His story starts out warm and saturated, and becomes cold and desaturated as his friends die and the story becomes grimmer.