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.