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.