Week 10: manga and the japanese comics tradition

For this week I read Seiichi Hayashi's Red Colored Elegy. "Experienced" would be a better word, because I haven't read anything like this. At first I was terribly confused and unprepared for it. I'm still pretty sure I'm both from the wrong culture and wrong time period to fully grasp what this comic means. That being said, as I forged ahead I started to make sense of things. It was really difficult distinguishing the different characters and which was talking at what time. I felt like I was figuring out a puzzle. On one hand I thought it was really complicated that way. It was difficult to understand what the author was trying to tell me. Some sequences seem to start off and then abruptly end. I understood who to feel for. I understood some of what they did. On the other hand I thought that this comic realized what's possible within the medium. It utilized the feelings and moods images can evoke without being so attached to the literal facts of the plot. It was really poetic that way. The way the highly rendered sections of buildings or landscapes were peppered in throughout the comic lent to a very contemplative and subdued feeling. I really enjoyed the section of the book were the main character's hands are shown playing with a matchbox. It reminded me of the physiological tic that some people have during conversation where they keep their hands busy and how sometimes the hands say just as much as words do. I also found the sequence where King Kong and Godzilla barge in on the couple's conversation to be very interesting. I don't know whether it's a comment on the times or just a physical manifestation of the struggles within their relationship and their personal lives. The main feeling that I got during the reading was that these strange seemingly random events are significant in some way, but I don't know why or how. Some things like faces missing noses, intrusive lizards, and creaking swings seemed absolutely random to me. I wonder how much of this comic is intentionally ambiguous and not just so because of my own ignorance. If it is intentionally ambiguous in its message, I am glad to have read it, but I hope to read something that has an intended message and utilizes similar techniques as this comic did.

Week 9: A wide world of comics

I read The Nikopol Trilogy by Enki Bilal. It was a really strange read. I don't know if I tried too hard to find something to like about the story, or whether I was just not in the mood to enjoy it as much as I expected too. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was the fact that I expected something really grand of a graphic novel that was in production for over 12 years. Overall I didn't feel that the story provided enough reality to the plot. It felt like the story just moved across orchestrated plot points that had to be hit. The pacing felt too even throughout. It felt like a train that I've ridden before. Similarly to King by Ho Che Anderson, this graphic novel shows stylistic shifts over the three chapters. The visual style remains very similar throughout The Nikopol Trilogy, but the story itself gets deeper and the artist uses more interesting ways of telling it as you progress. The first chapter introduces the basics. The second chapter explores showing a different reality via color, includes photography, and uses type outside of speech balloons as a narrative voice. The third chapter explores putting symbols and images into word balloons. It feels like many comic book artists are learning continuously as they're making them. Which gives me hope for future innovations within the medium. I liked how this artist included a large amount of absurd science fiction within this work. The giraffe print coats, green striped cats, and red haired officials make The Nikopol Trilogy a characteristically gaudy science fiction.

As far as the visuals are concerned, I thought Bilal's strength was in showing the dilapidated nature of his science fiction environments. It all felt very grimy and unkempt. The vehicles and other technologies showed a great degree of detail that made them believable. My least favorite aspect of his work was the faces of the human characters, especially those in the first chapter. I had difficulty differentiating them from one another and they didn't seem to talk, most all of them had their lips sealed even though they were supposed to be talking. The colors weren't too great either, in my opinion, they felt a bit too local. If something was supposed to be blue, it was overwhelmingly so.