For this week I read King by Ho Che Anderson and Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow by James Sturm and Rich Tommaso. I really liked the path that Ho Che Andreson took to portray Martin Luther King. It was an evenhanded portrait not just of King, but also of the public at the time. I enjoyed reading the several differing accounts and opinions about Martin Luther King. They showed the several different facets of his public image. I liked how every success in King's movement was tempered by the harsh reality that change isn't immediate in terms of both governmental policies and the culture ingrained in some African Americans.
The noir art style was really well done. My only contention is that the stylization made it difficult to keep track of who was Martin Luther King. I think that this would be important since it is a biographical work after all. Although I really enjoyed the art direction in the first volume, I felt that the third volume's style with its dated Photoshop effects and expressive art didn't have a purpose. As the author said in the epilogue, he changed the style because he thought he proved himself with the first. I don't think that is at all a good reason to distract the reader from the story. I support experimentation as long as it is purposeful. I did enjoy the inclusion of photographs from the time period. It really drove home the point that this is rooted in history, that it really happened.
The narrative was sometimes hard to follow. At times I had no clue who half the people in a scene were and I still don't. I am fine with that. I'm sure I didn't need to know who they were in order to grasp the point of the story. At times I didn't know who was speaking or in what order. I am less okay with that. I didn't know who to attribute certain characterizations with. I had to guess based more on word choice, and since King was a more eloquent speaker that was easier to do. I also had to reorder certain passages I read, because they didn't make sense in the first run through. I'm glad that in the third novel the author used colored text boxes to distinguish between speakers. That allowed for some interesting sequences where you knew who was talking but the imagery didn't necessarily go along with the words. Some of my favorite passages include those of King's promiscuity. The images suggested his philandering nature while the narrative moved along not even acknowledging it. I also liked the conflicting facts Ho Che Anderson presented you with. He showed you those scenes where he cheated on Correta Scott King, but he also included opinions of people who said unequivocally that he never cheated on her. I wish there were more moments of conflicting information like that. I thought it provided an extra layer of reality and involved the reader to make their own sense of who Martin Luther King was.
Some of the sequences were very word heavy in my opinion, and just used copied panels to move along the story. I don't know how much I liked that. Having said all that I found it really interesting, probably mostly because of how well researched it sounded. I could believe every single detail. It was real in that visceral way which deals the good and the bad in the same hand. It was definitely thought provoking.
I read the Satchel Paige biography also because I have heard of this person and I wanted to learn about him, and also to add another biographical work in addition to the 5 or so we have already read. Although I have never seen a game of baseball, I did feel tension and excitement whenever Paige was on the pitcher's mound due to the perfect pacing of the panels. I loved how the artist exaggerated the pitching poses and how he told it from the point of view of another player's experience of him. That allowed the author to show how much of an impact he had on a personal level in a small town.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Week 7: Maus
While reading Maus I enjoyed noting the variety of visual techniques that Spiegelman utilizes to get his message across. Some of my favorite moments include the map drawings, which quickly helped me understand the size and location of the camps. The schematics of the gas chambers and the stitching of shoes were also interesting in how much detail they provided, although it was mostly explained in words as well. I also like the moment when Vladek's flashback of the four women hanging mixed in together with the time he was speaking. I like how that visual trick served as an exaggeration of how long they hung. To me one of the most interesting moments was when the book flashed forward to the present at the time of the writing the book. I was intrigued that he presented people as wearing masks of their particular cultures. Since masks are disguises, I came to think that Spiegelman's meaning behind this was that people's birthplaces and the particular cultures they come from aren't a true reflection of the individual behind the mask, since he drew their distinctly different human ears and hair cuts sticking out of the back of the masks. I found it really interesting how all of the characters didn't have any individual features besides clothing, so when Vladek ended up in Auschwitz in prison garb he was difficult to distinguish as an individual, which puts the reader in the same place that the Nazis were in their own thinking. It was also great how Spiegelman helped the reader keep track of Vladek via the captions and by what the characters said.
I am always interested in the balance of text to imagery in comic books, and especially what purpose each one serves. In Maus, the visuals typically distinguished who was talking and where they were, or they illustrated the text in the captions or word balloons. From what I can tell every single panel in this graphic novel has on average two fields of text associated with it. This is due to Spiegelman using the captions of his father's dictation as a narrative guide throughout the story. These captions provided a thorough understanding of Spiegelman's conversations with Vladek. They also helped characterize Vladek through how he describes the events of his past and also his broken English showed his age and background. The text clearly guides the narrative as opposed to the illustrations. Granted that the way the words are illustrated was quite ingenious at times, but the images rarely served their own independent function plot wise, it usually only helped to make analogies. One example of this is when Anja and Vladek pretended to be Poles and Anja was not disguised as well as Vladek was. You can clearly see Anja's mouse tail sticking out from under her coat, which gives her away. While this is an interesting way of depicting what the author meant, it doesn't necessarily contribute much besides a clever image. It illustrated what's already written below the images in the caption.
I like the use of images for moving the plot along and including something that the words don't already explain. In that sense it's possible to fit more content per page both in terms of plot progression and increasing the depth of the story. Words are good at some things and images are good at others, comics can utilize the strengths of each. This is the beauty of comics.
Maus utilized this idea well by using showing different anthropomorphic animals as members of different cultures. Since it's a visual metaphor it allowed me to quickly recognize the culture of each character, without an overt caption explaining it in text. This fact is important in this story in particular, because just by drawing a character as cat or a pig served to create tension or ease at the speed of seeing an image.
Overall I feel that Maus is an amazing piece of meta-writing. Most of the things that I had concerns or quibbles about were resolved by rereading or by thinking about it for a minute. It makes sense that Maus was reviewed by book reviewers, since it was really quite word heavy, and I'm really glad it was. Although I personally prefer having the visuals being more of a focus, I found Maus to be an utterly magnificent and enchanting.
I am always interested in the balance of text to imagery in comic books, and especially what purpose each one serves. In Maus, the visuals typically distinguished who was talking and where they were, or they illustrated the text in the captions or word balloons. From what I can tell every single panel in this graphic novel has on average two fields of text associated with it. This is due to Spiegelman using the captions of his father's dictation as a narrative guide throughout the story. These captions provided a thorough understanding of Spiegelman's conversations with Vladek. They also helped characterize Vladek through how he describes the events of his past and also his broken English showed his age and background. The text clearly guides the narrative as opposed to the illustrations. Granted that the way the words are illustrated was quite ingenious at times, but the images rarely served their own independent function plot wise, it usually only helped to make analogies. One example of this is when Anja and Vladek pretended to be Poles and Anja was not disguised as well as Vladek was. You can clearly see Anja's mouse tail sticking out from under her coat, which gives her away. While this is an interesting way of depicting what the author meant, it doesn't necessarily contribute much besides a clever image. It illustrated what's already written below the images in the caption.
I like the use of images for moving the plot along and including something that the words don't already explain. In that sense it's possible to fit more content per page both in terms of plot progression and increasing the depth of the story. Words are good at some things and images are good at others, comics can utilize the strengths of each. This is the beauty of comics.
Maus utilized this idea well by using showing different anthropomorphic animals as members of different cultures. Since it's a visual metaphor it allowed me to quickly recognize the culture of each character, without an overt caption explaining it in text. This fact is important in this story in particular, because just by drawing a character as cat or a pig served to create tension or ease at the speed of seeing an image.
Overall I feel that Maus is an amazing piece of meta-writing. Most of the things that I had concerns or quibbles about were resolved by rereading or by thinking about it for a minute. It makes sense that Maus was reviewed by book reviewers, since it was really quite word heavy, and I'm really glad it was. Although I personally prefer having the visuals being more of a focus, I found Maus to be an utterly magnificent and enchanting.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Week 6: Underground Comics
I read Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural and the Air Pirate Funnies. A lot of these short comics revolved around humorous word play and sexual humor, while others were disturbing. Some of the strips I read broke the fourth wall, which I haven't seen previously. Some comics rhymed and read like song, while others morphed and transformed before your eyes. I see how underground comics were an explosion of exploration within the confines of the humorous comic strip. There is a strong feeling of a lack of inhibition in these comics, and that seems what comics really needed at the time. They started handling more serious topics like politics and religion, while still being couched in the form of the comic strip.
The more sexual, racist, and violent of these strips appear to be jab at the rules of the establishment and they seem to thrive on shock value. It's interesting as an observation of base human tendencies, but I don't know how much of that I can handle. Mainly because if the characters only project base desires then the plot will inevitably involve them killing something or fucking it and the dialogue will consist of grunts and yelps.
As far as art that's meant to be shocking. To me, it quickly looses its appeal. Simply because it's easy to think of taboos and one can become numb to it. I've seen pictures of fine artists shooting paint out of their butts, I've heard of people describing 9/11 as the greatest work of art ever made, I've heard of a guy who discharged semen on to every page of a book, an exhibit where the artist starved a dog to death. I feel like shocking art has a simple formula, find something taboo and cross that line. I guess that my preference is more towards worlds I can lose myself, novels with motifs metaphors and make me cry or be left in awe or learn something.
The more sexual, racist, and violent of these strips appear to be jab at the rules of the establishment and they seem to thrive on shock value. It's interesting as an observation of base human tendencies, but I don't know how much of that I can handle. Mainly because if the characters only project base desires then the plot will inevitably involve them killing something or fucking it and the dialogue will consist of grunts and yelps.
As far as art that's meant to be shocking. To me, it quickly looses its appeal. Simply because it's easy to think of taboos and one can become numb to it. I've seen pictures of fine artists shooting paint out of their butts, I've heard of people describing 9/11 as the greatest work of art ever made, I've heard of a guy who discharged semen on to every page of a book, an exhibit where the artist starved a dog to death. I feel like shocking art has a simple formula, find something taboo and cross that line. I guess that my preference is more towards worlds I can lose myself, novels with motifs metaphors and make me cry or be left in awe or learn something.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Week 5: Body Talk: Eisner and Thompson
I know that I'm supposed to look at the works of the past with their context in mind. I've had a lot of trouble with this idea in the past. I rarely enjoyed looking at medieval Madonna paintings with their grey skinned man-babies, their freakishly proportioned women, and their blatant disregard for anything dimensional. I've tried to appreciate them... I really did. I found that I could appreciate them as being a kind of historical anomaly. Hell, historically they are surrounded by more appealing works from both sides of the timeline. I found that I could appreciate them as a result of pious men's devotion to god. I could even appreciate them for their use of mixed media. Gold leaf backgrounds!
How opulent.
I found that my inability to suspend where I am in history as the cause of a really great struggle when reading Will Eisner's A Contract with God. Not only because I have no idea what 1978 was like, but also because it is a work within a burgeoning medium that is eternally ridiculed. I'm not quite sure what comics came before or after it, because I have not read that many of them. Initially my expectations were raised after reading the wordy preamble. I felt that it offered justifications for the art work as being the caricature of events from a child's memories, but that didn't hold up at all once I got into the work. I felt that the dialogue was incredibly overt. It was unimaginatively stuffed into dialogue balloons in order to make the characters talk about their own traits and backgrounds for no reason, or even to describe what was already communicated via the drawings. Some examples of this would include a woman yelling something along the lines of "he's killing me and he's killing my baby" during a panel that clearly shows a domestic disturbance. I have no idea what would prompt her to turn so robotic at such a moment, she wasn't yelling for help, she was just stating the facts. Another example of the strangeness of this graphic novel is when a doctor in training tells the man who raped the girl he's infatuated with that there is a medical problem with his penis. Essentially it felt like the author was trying to condense the emotional roller coaster of 4 novels within a pamphlet. This leads to skipping the idea of pacing and establishing a world and making things appear believable.
Having read up more about this graphic novel, I now understand that it's the first of its kind.
That being said, I do think that other works around that time like Moebius' short form stories in Heavy Metal were more successful in utilizing the medium in most ways. They didn't seem disjointed. They used artwork in an imaginative way which only the medium of comics could provide and they also shared interesting passages and ideas in which I was completely lost in. Even Little Nemo in Slumberland, I thought, was more engrossing, enriching, and emotional, and more inclined to use the medium's strengths. I would have never expected that lengthening a comic would lead to such a rough road.
Craig Thompson's Blankets was a completely different matter. It was an emotionally engrossing story. I felt for the characters and I didn't see any plot elements coming from too far away. I liked its creative use of panels, although a couple of them, to me, seemed a little forced. One example of this is when, out of nowhere, a panel showing TV static transitions into the main character shaving. I guess it might work as far as setting the mood of his girlfriend's house and repeats the static motif of that chapter, but it seemed a little abrupt. I really enjoyed the largely empty panels that made me feel lost, and also the more metaphorical imagery, for example when the car drives off the panel and falls, right after he leaves to go home from his stay at his girlfriend's. I really liked the ambiguity that I felt about certain events at the beginning which were explained later in the work. I was thoroughly invested in finding out what happened next. I liked how the author intertwined biblical imagery and metaphors within the action in the story. I also liked the smaller things like overlapping dialogue balloons with thought balloons to show that the character wasn't listening. There's a ton of things that this graphic novel is doing right, and it would be hard to list them here. I felt emotionally drained after reading it, and that, is a feat that comics want to be appreciated for. I definitely appreciate it.
How opulent.
I found that my inability to suspend where I am in history as the cause of a really great struggle when reading Will Eisner's A Contract with God. Not only because I have no idea what 1978 was like, but also because it is a work within a burgeoning medium that is eternally ridiculed. I'm not quite sure what comics came before or after it, because I have not read that many of them. Initially my expectations were raised after reading the wordy preamble. I felt that it offered justifications for the art work as being the caricature of events from a child's memories, but that didn't hold up at all once I got into the work. I felt that the dialogue was incredibly overt. It was unimaginatively stuffed into dialogue balloons in order to make the characters talk about their own traits and backgrounds for no reason, or even to describe what was already communicated via the drawings. Some examples of this would include a woman yelling something along the lines of "he's killing me and he's killing my baby" during a panel that clearly shows a domestic disturbance. I have no idea what would prompt her to turn so robotic at such a moment, she wasn't yelling for help, she was just stating the facts. Another example of the strangeness of this graphic novel is when a doctor in training tells the man who raped the girl he's infatuated with that there is a medical problem with his penis. Essentially it felt like the author was trying to condense the emotional roller coaster of 4 novels within a pamphlet. This leads to skipping the idea of pacing and establishing a world and making things appear believable.
Having read up more about this graphic novel, I now understand that it's the first of its kind.
That being said, I do think that other works around that time like Moebius' short form stories in Heavy Metal were more successful in utilizing the medium in most ways. They didn't seem disjointed. They used artwork in an imaginative way which only the medium of comics could provide and they also shared interesting passages and ideas in which I was completely lost in. Even Little Nemo in Slumberland, I thought, was more engrossing, enriching, and emotional, and more inclined to use the medium's strengths. I would have never expected that lengthening a comic would lead to such a rough road.
Craig Thompson's Blankets was a completely different matter. It was an emotionally engrossing story. I felt for the characters and I didn't see any plot elements coming from too far away. I liked its creative use of panels, although a couple of them, to me, seemed a little forced. One example of this is when, out of nowhere, a panel showing TV static transitions into the main character shaving. I guess it might work as far as setting the mood of his girlfriend's house and repeats the static motif of that chapter, but it seemed a little abrupt. I really enjoyed the largely empty panels that made me feel lost, and also the more metaphorical imagery, for example when the car drives off the panel and falls, right after he leaves to go home from his stay at his girlfriend's. I really liked the ambiguity that I felt about certain events at the beginning which were explained later in the work. I was thoroughly invested in finding out what happened next. I liked how the author intertwined biblical imagery and metaphors within the action in the story. I also liked the smaller things like overlapping dialogue balloons with thought balloons to show that the character wasn't listening. There's a ton of things that this graphic novel is doing right, and it would be hard to list them here. I felt emotionally drained after reading it, and that, is a feat that comics want to be appreciated for. I definitely appreciate it.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
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