The Future of Comics

I started readin Octopus Pie and... I couldnt stop. this comic is great, i love how it slightly changes styles and the stories and quarky and funny and clever. ill definitely be a constant reader! i think this is a good future of comics. its very accessible to everyone and its fun to be a part of!

Reconsidering the Superhero

I read Crisis on Infinite Earth for this week's comic. THERE WAS SO MUCH THAT HAPPENED! the amount of people and environmental drawing was insane! it was detailed and gritty and I LOVED it. there story lines was just as crazy which is to be expected from these kind of comics but I really liked how many characters were used. a lot of the died as well which took me by surprise, i still dont read a lot of comics but i have never really heard or seen any that have an actual hero dying. I liked how they got Super girl and Batgirl in a comic together that was fun to see. Over all these were a really fun read!

Comics as Contemporary literature

I read Jimmy Corrigan the smartest kid on earth for this week's assingment and LOVED IT. it really reminded me of Stewie from Family Guy and i read the entire comic in his voice. the style was really cool it had a nice vintage look to it and i really enjoyed the borders. i got confused a lot reading through these, so much happened in each segment and they were all so insanely different from each other! they were just so weird. a very fun comic!

Manga and the Japanese Comics Tradition

I read Yaoi Cinderella Boy for this week's assignment. I have never liked or appreciated Manga before, and i still dont. but not to the extent before i actually read some of it. it does flow a lot better than i expected. the drawings and style is just way too much for me. the stories are actually kind of engrossing but i am just taken out of it because i am literally disgusted by some of the drawings. There are some that i am very impressed by, the poses are so ridiculous that it would be hard to draw and they seem pretty seamless. as far as this story goes, it was not what i was expecting. it took me by surprise in a few places and i laughed out loud a couple of times. mostly from how ridiculous the whole thing was but it ade me smile through out. Just thinking about having that kind of life and lying to that many people would be so hard to do. i liked this all in all and wasn't completely pissed off by the end like i thought i would be!

A Wide World of Comics

This comic made me really appreciate my life. Not being able to wear what you want to wear, not having the same rights as everyone else? no thanks. that is not living! The scarf or a beating really stuck with me. to get that violent over a piece of cloth because of a tradition is insane. shows how unreasonable and unchanging people can be. I liked the hard angles that some of the women's veils were drawn with. it made them look more evil. I really enjoyed this style. it was simple but complicated at the same time. it looked like a big black blob at times but the people's limbs were cut out with jarring white lines and were able to be separated after some time. the anatomy figure class was great. we used to do nudes but times have changed. they learned how to draw window drapes. To think that people had to deal with crap like this makes me angry. to hinder one's education because a couple of people think something is wrong is inexcusable. like I said this comic made me very appreciative of my life.

Stereotype and the ethics of representation

For this week's assignment I read Stuck Rubber Baby by Hoard Cruse. I didnt know there was going to be so much in one comic! it burned through a lot of heavy topics. I really enjoyed how real it felt, i really got drawn into the story and the problems everyone was facing. The style was great, i cannot even imagine how long it must have taken the artist to do all this work. it looks like a mix of traditional pen and ink line work with ALOT of stippling. I liked Toland as a character. he stood up for what he believed in and I really liked that about him. I wonder why he chose to makke all the characters look manly tho. the women were very burly and had big jaws and a lot of girth. At times the men were drawn prettier than the women! It was different and I liked it.

Mause

   Ive always been interested in the Holocost. we learned a bit about it in High school but definitely not enough.  I always was revolted by the things we learned about it, and I still have not seen Shindler's list and dont really have a desire to. I will never really choose to learn more about it, but if it is there in front of me then i wont look away. its terrible yet fascinating and I am drawn in by the curiosity of how terrible humanity can be.
   Seeing as how Maus had its characters as animals did not distract or take away from the story for me. In fact it was kind of worse, because its like showing anything no matter what can be this evil. the diagrams of the gas chambers and stuff freaked me out as well, it made it so much more real.
   All of the survivors must have had it so rough. I cannot imagine living through that and coming out as a whole person wether you were in the camps or one of the soldiers. it was all around so revolting that it did not surprise me when the mother committed suicide. yes, she left her husband and son, but i feel like she would never really be there for them and it would be worse to see her suffer. i liked that they used cats and mice as characters. it made it clear and simple and definitely exaggerated the german's powers over the jews. I was surprised how well the time transitions from the World War II era to the present in New York worked. I have never seen editing like this done  outside a movie or television seriesand worked so well before.  The reading and imagery flow effortlessly.I enjoyed the style to an extent. i thought it matched the situations and story, but im usually a fan of more detailed work.  All in all it was a good read!

Underground Comics

I read some Gay Comix and Fat Freddy's Cat. I really hated the styles of the Gay comix, i could only read two or three of them but they all just pissed me off because of how ridiculous they were. i understand that the time they were made was very different for the gay community but im just sick of hearing and reading the same stuff over and over again. The aspect of certain religious folks hating gays and not accepting them into society and people not understanding gays and stereotyping them. The one I read all the way through was Billy Goes Out. I could relate to this one the most because of Billy's experiences of going out to the bars and getting creeped out by the old men and other such weirdos going up to him. I liked how he kept having thought bubbles about him talking to his penis, it was odd but funny little breakups from his depressing night out. but in the end his dream of another guy showed he might start to be moving on from his bad break up so that was nice to see.

Fat Freddy's Cat is the funniest thing I have read in a looong time. Right away from the awesome gestures the characters were in and the hilarious rap the cat I knew that I was going to love this comic. That nasty cat has so many weird adventures. it was a fun read tho.

Tin Tin in Tibet

     This comic was wild. I am still confused about Tintin. his age, position in society, his clothes, everything but his immense courage, will, and determination. When he sets his mind to something he will get it DONE. The captain was a great character. He bothered me a bit in the beginning because he kept repeating himself over and over with the same line. Eventually tho I saw him as wonderful comic relief from the nonstop action. I have never seen someone with so many unfortunate happenings except the Baudelaire orphans. Tintin just rolls with the punches, and picks his head up and carries on.

     At first i wasn't sure how to react to this comic. it seemed completely unbelievable that his friend was still alive, and it took a completely realistic time for them to do anything or go anywhere and by the time they got to the plane crash it must have been like a month. They didn't even find him for about another week or so. The whole Yeti business threw me for a loop as well, I did not know this comic had supernatural stuff in it so i thought it was weird how often they kept bringing it up but when it showed the monk Lightning having a vision and he was floating i paused and realized the yeti was real and the comic got a lot more interesting. Stylistically i am not really a fan of how simple everything was but after reading the whole thing i definitely appreciate it a lot more. The simplistic characters in the detailed backgrounds were nice contrasts of each other so it was easy to tell what was going on. There was so much action through out this comic that i did not stop reading it from beginning to end i flew through it!

Comic Strips

I read Little Nemo and a bit of Krazy Kat. Little nemo was an experience. those are some very strange stories and drawings. I enjoyed the style tho, the dark outlined characters and the flatter colors. the character designs were a bit too realistic for my taste. the clowns were way too creepy. as far as the story goes, well its a dream everytime so the story can be anything and can go any direction. It must have been fun coming up with the ideas for the dreams. I like how it always ends with nemo getting woken up somehow in the real world wether he is falling out of bed or his mother has woken him.

Krazy Kat was adorable. I love that the cat is obsessed with the mouse who is constantly trying to hurt him.  i am usually not a fan of this kind of style but it worked so well with the crazy situations they get into and its simple enough that it works perfectly.

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

I loved this. I never really read comics growing up, a Batman and a Spawn here and there and I got into the Simpsons for a while but I never truly read them or understood them fully. I recently got the entire Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics from a friend and I have not been able to put them down. I really enjoyed the style, the simplistic characters with the rendered backgrounds. the characters did sometimes look fully rendered as well but it really brought me into the story. McCloud talks about the relation we have with comic book characters, the more simplistic the character the easier it is to relate to them and put yourself in their situation. I really enjoyed how he explained everything throught the use of a comic book. it took a little while to get used to this layout but eventually i got into a good flow and flew through it.

The Arrival: Shaun Tan

the arrival is gorgeous. the story of a man leaving his family to go to a foreign country to make a better life for them is laid out in this graphic narrative in beautiful style. I had to look through it a couple of times to fully understand what was happening, but i am horrible at reading into things and trying to get the deeper meaning out of things. When I finally got it tho the story became clear and I was right there beside this poor man traveling into a foreign place where everything seems larger than life and completely unknown. The images had so much depth and strength to them that they were completely foreboding and the feeling of uneasiness was so strong that i feel it by just looking at it. this is an incredible series of images and i would love to see more  

Ernst

Ernst

The first image is of a woman casting a spell maybe sacrificing the chicken. She is not looking at the chicken which leads me to believe that she is casting the spell on someone or something else.The second image shows a woman lying dead On a table and a winged creature standing over her. I think this may be death coming to take her soul away. The chicken is ther in the room with them so maybe it has to do with the spell the woman cast. I think the next image is the woman's soul being led out of her body.i think she is then sold to a dude, perhaps a magician theres a smoking top hat in the corner. She then commits suicide or is pecked to death by the roosters in her room and the guy who bought her is very upset I don't think he knew about the roosters.The eighth image is a man dancing and there is a rooster in the room so he is probably going to die