Week 15

These stories told by Will Eisner have shown a more serious side of comic subject matter that up to his point has not yet seen. Most of the stories we have read in class so far had to do with more light and very cartoony stories and characters perhaps with the exception of Tales from the Crypt, but even those stories were pretty over the top and silly for the subject matter. The problems were one dimensional with it usually being how will the villain be thwarted by the. But with a Contract with God we see very real and mature themes shown in these stories, many of them dealing with the members of the jewish people and people who lived in early 1920s New York poor tenement apartments . He shows in the first story a pretty compelling tale of a rabbi who turns his life from being a rabbi to a real-estate tycoon after God allegedly breaks the contract they had. He eventually forms a new one by making other rabbis at temple write out a new one, the second story has to do with a supor who everyone hates that has a thing for younger girls. This gets him into so much trouble he kills himself at the end and nobody cares much. The final tale was young people falling in love and deceiving each other for money and power. All these stories were very well told, interesting to read and visually gorgeous. But more then that they told stories that aren't too different from what we see in the news and hear about today. These stories show all aspects of human nature from greed to how society wants you to live out your religion. The focusing in on a marginalized people, in this case the Jews, gave a unique look into the lives of a people that don't typically get media based on them. Will Eisner had a unique voice in the comics world and reading A Contract With God shows how well he could tell stories that were character driven as well as a visual delight to look at.

Reconsidering The Hero

For this reading I decided to read one of the alternate readings which I had always been meaning to get to reading which was All Star Superman. Not alot of people like Superman they think he's boring or some kind of goody goody boy scout. But when I see Superman I think of him more as an example of what we could all become if we were the best of ourselves and thats what I think Superman is an analogy for an idealized version of what all humans could be if we wanted too. But All Star Superman shows the feats Superman has to do before he dies at the end of the story. It shows what Superman feels he must do and what he feels he owes to the people he cares about, his adversaries, his acquaintances, other lifeforms and the world as a whole. It has really compelling writing and makes the reader think about what Superman has to deal with, the scarifices that come with the power he wields and what he feels he must accomplish in the time he has left to live. A very good read even if you aren't a fan of DC or Superman    

Contemporary Comics

One of the contemporary comics for this week that was on the resource page that I read was Neil Gaiman's Sandman. A very strange but well told story about one of the 7 entities of the afterlife. In the story some of the  cultists are trying to capture and own death, they accidentally end up catching the sandman instead, and end up becoming eternally tormented after the his release. The story follows the Sandman trying to re obtain his power, and encounter his brother death. The story is actually very initiative and easy to follow,, but its pacing is strange, it is always making callbacks to itself back together every other page. As a reader it made me feel pretty empowered to recognize when it was happening and remembering it . Which i think is something thats very powerful to use and have in a story. The images were everywhere, and it felt like a strange retelling from Dr. Seuss due to the abstractions and creative shapes in the art. The story seemed dark in both humor and telling, but had fairly vibrant colors. I would very much recommend anyone who hasnt taken a look at The Sandman to do so as soon as you can.

Manga

I've been a huge fan of manga for some time now. I will be honest that I wasnt a big fan of many of the reading choices for this week. I had read Death Note some time ago and while it has an interesting premise behind it, the execution is a little over the top for my tastes. To many convoluted plans turning out to be right kinda push the bounds of my patience. The others Bakuman was a bit more interesting, I like the premise of something being slice of life and following the life of wannabe artists trying to get published was a pretty apt analogy for what alot of us are trying to do in our time at Ringling. Scott Pilgrim I thought was an odd choice to be put in the category or manga but it makes sense. I wasn't a big fan of Scott Pilgrim, the story was kinda dumb in my opinion, the callout to comic books and video games were ok but they never really went anywhere besides a "oh I remember what thats from".So all in all this weeks choices were mainly manga I havent read but were ones I was not interested in at all.        

Wide World of Comics

For this weeks assignments I first took a look at Guy Delisle's Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. I havent seen any of his works but I was interested to see a western persons perspective on North Korean life. He went there to help with animation which I found interesting as I did not know they did animation in North Korea. But the comic chronicled him working in the office building and the very few times he was allowed to venture out. I saw how he thought the North Koreans acted, which to my surpise was fairly normal with a bit of paranoia to be honest. But he showed what it was like for a foreigner to be in a almost completely sealed off country. The other comic I read was Blacksad. At first when I saw it I thought 'oh no a furry comic' but I couldnt have been more wrong. It was a very very well drawn detective story with lots of crime noir influence. The different races are represented by different animals which I thought was pretty clever and the setting seems to be sometime in the 1950s/60s. It takes place in America with the protagonist Blacksad helping out his clients as best he can. I really recommend this it was a great read.  

Stereotyping In Comics

As a black individual I'm no stranger to stereotyping. I see it in literally every piece of media out there; film, music, video games, TV and comics. And Im very much against the use of these to try and characterize someone or something. It cheapens the character and leaves no room for growth or interest. Games always have a character that is just black man. He is loud, joval talks in slang and has dreads or has some kind of jewelry, these attributes are the whole of the character he is one dimensional and never becomes more then a sidekick or comic relief. I dont feel that stereotyping is necessary to portray people of color or women or someone that is non white. There might be some things that you could take from culturally but not to the degree to make that character an obvious stereotype. And as a black guy in America I have been affected by the ways people stereotype blacks, people have seen me come into a room and change the way they talk and even put on hip hop cause they thought I would like it.        

In Class Writing

Prominent symbols. There are alot of prominent symbols throughout Preacher, one that is unique to the main character of Jesse is that his subconscious is personified by the image of John Wayne. You find out later in the comic he came up with this after his very rough and tumultuous childhood and it serves as Jesse's spiritual guide and confidant. There is an over arching theme of old western movies and how they involve chasing down someone. 

Connections? The only connection I could kind of make was that of how Jesse became tired with his vocation of being a preacher. I sometimes become fed up with certain aspects of my life and wish to voice my true opinions especially when it come to religion and how I eventually left the faith I had since i was a child.

Adaptation. I feel this story would be interesting to have on TV, maybe something like HBO or if it needed to be on network television AMC. I would probably tone down some of the more graphic depictions of heads being blown off if it needed to be on network TV. I might change the design of some of the angels cause they really feel a bit generic and typical. I'd also take the time to make the depictions of heaven seem more grandiose because heaven in the comic looks like a big empty house which is kinda boring.      

The Comic Strip

For the selection of comic strips i looked at Little Nemo, Krazy Kat and Peanuts. Each of those comics were very fun to read and look at. The first comics I looked at were Little Nemo, I have seen these comics before and it was really nice getting to read a variety of them in a larger format, looking at it digitally lets me see the very intricate drawings and sense of color and design that Winsor had when he was drawing them. The locations for the dream land and the backgrounds and vistas he drew were truly breathtaking.
I had always loved reading Peanuts in the comics section of the Sunday Newspaper so it was really nice and nostalgic to reread this strips. I mostly read the 1990s collection and found that I even recognized some of the strips, Shultz wrote them in a very classic and wholesome manner which is in a way refreshing when compared to alot of contemporary comics that I read.
Krazy Kat was something I never heard of or seen before but from what I remembered in class the panels were pretty fun so i decided to look at some more. It is drawn very simply but its very appealing to look at, the stories are short and do a lot of slapstick humor which reminds me of Tom and Jerry.

Legitimation of the Comics

The graphic novel Maus is the story of Art Spiegelman's father, Vladek telling Art about his experience as a polish jew living in Nazi occupied Poland and then how he lived and survived in a concentration camp. It uses animals to depict the different races of people like Jews are represented as mice, Americans are represented as dogs and Germans are shown as cats. I feel he uses this so the readers can easily associate groups with each other and differentiate them at the same time. Even though each group is represented by animals they dont have those animal characteristics like even though Polish people were shown as pigs it wasn't to be interpreted as an insult.

Something very interesting that Art depicted in Maus was how his father acted and his attitudes towards other people and races. Art does not make it seem like his father was some sort of perfectly tolerant, kind and welcoming man. He makes it show that his father has faults and his own inherent prejudices, in the novel Art, his wife and his father are driving and they pull over to give a black hitchhiker a ride into town. His dad is not happy about this at all and starts to mutter racist comments in yiddish under his breath while Art and his wife have polite conversation with the man, as he gets out Vladek yells at them for letting a black man into the car. Art's wife asks how after all Vladek has been through he can say such things but he laughs at the comparison of blacks to Jews. It is shown that Vladek is very miserly, overbearing with Art and very stuck up when it comes to things Art does. But I don't think Art was trying to slander his father, I feel its just his way of saying that his father is a person with faults but also good qualities.

 This story to me this personal account is memorable due to the fact that instead of just telling the father's story we get to know him as he was then and is now. His personal relationships with his family and we get to know his family as well, how they feel about his and what they are like. With most stories dealing with that you only get what happened in a certain time frame, while that is important as a reader I am always curious of the question "then what". What does he do, how does he cope, how does he rebuild and in Maus you get those answers, you find out his first wife killed herself, you find out he got re-married, and you find out what became of him after those terrible events.          

Underground Comix

For this weeks reading I chose to read The comics by Robert Crumb and the Arcade Comics Review. I have to say these were not what I expected from underground comics. They all have no real imitations on what they express so there was plenty of nudity, cursing and racial stereotypes in these ones. I can understand the idea behind why these exist. For the time they were an important part of the counter culture and showing that there were alternatives to the comics in their days. Very weird stories involving men having sex with sasquaches and other odd kinds of slice of life stories. While some of these were actually fairly entertaining they really werent for me. I don't really go for that kind of reading material in my comics, thats not to say I dont get why they were made or I think they should have been banned or restricted, these comics were just not my cup of tea subject matter wise. I do however think that the illustrations in them were very weird but very cool to look at. Lots of pretty psychedelic drawings and unrefined scribbles that were all pretty charming to me. It showed what the people that drew and wrote these comics thought about and deemed important enough for mockery.    

Contract With God

These stories told by Will Eisner showed a more serious side of comics that prior were not yet seen. Most of the things we have seen in class so far had to do with more light and very cartoony stories and characters perhaps with the exception of Tales from the Crypt, but even those stories were pretty over the top and silly for the subject matter. With a Contract with God we see very real and mature themes shown in these stories, many of them dealing with the members of the jewish people. He shows in the first story a pretty compelling tale of a rabbi who turns his life from being a rabbi to a real-estate tycoon after God allegedly breaks the contract they had. He eventually forms a new one by making other rabbis at temple write out a new one, the second story has to do with a supor who everyone hates that has a thing for younger girls. This gets him into so much trouble he kills himself at the end and nobody cares much. The final tale was young people falling in love and deceiving each other for money and power. All these stories were very well told, interesting to read and visually gorgeous, Will Eisner had a talent for melding all of these whenever he told a story and these series were a delight to read.    

The Comic Book

For the assignment of reading earlier works in comic book history I chose to read first Tales from the Crypt. I had heard about these comics from documentaries about comic book history but I wasn't really expecting to see what I read in them. These comics were written in the 50s so I expected some fairly conservative spooky stories, somewhat akin to a campfire ghost story, but I was pretty surprised at what they featured. The first one was about a man stranded with no food on an island and they show him bitting into a rat ravenously and him eventually being eaten by a shark. Another one had an axe murderer killing someones wife and another showing a man being buried alive at sea stuck in a box. I feel these are very adult concepts being portrayed and because these were marketed to kids I thought man no wonder the comics code was established shortly after. I feel now a days if someone wanted to make this into some kind of cartoon it might be marketed towards older kids maybe in their teens. It was a far cry from the others ones I looked at like Airboy or some of the Action comics i read which had more of what I thought I would see, pulp like stories and simplistic characters kids could relate to.  

Week 1: The Arrival

In Shaun Tan's "The Arrival" the idea of traveling to a new and interesting place is portrayed very fluidly without a single word printed. And the ideas and themes in this are presented so clearly in "The Arrival" that words aren't necessary. Now the idea of presenting a graphic novel with no text in it has been done before but the key to having one that works is a clear and relatable story, as well as interesting storyboard compositions. The story in this was one that most everyone can relate to, arriving to a new place and having to figure things out on your own. When you make a situation relatable enough the viewer can insert himself or herself in and have a good understanding of what is happening.

 In terms of composition, careful placement can make readers look where you want them, or ignore details that would confuse the reader. A lot of the shots were done from a close view so the reader could also experience what the man was experiencing. Tan’s handling of the drawings in each panel also contributes to the clarity of the novel. While the setting was fantastical, there were enough visual similarities to the real world for me relate to places I have traveled. Also when the main character was dealing with new things the way they were presented made me confused but had enough similarities with real world tasks for me to guess what he was trying to do. Tan also really captured the man’s facial expressions, which gives us queues to what the man is experiencing without needing to have a text box.

He also used value to set moods and tones for the panels. Like when the giants are sucking people up their helmets lights are lit up against a their dark figures so your eyes naturally go the giants. Or when he first arrives in his apartment and its relatively dark to show the loneliness of the setting. These elements used in “The Arrival” are things that can be done to make your story cohesive without the need of text. Also this was an amazing read with really beautifully done illustrations I’m probably going to end up buying this before I graduate.