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.