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.
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