Week 12: Graphic fiction and non-fiction

For this week I read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. First of all I have to admit that seeing Alison's father in substantially low cut shorts in the very first frames of the novel gave me suspicions that were exactly on the mark. As an outside observer those shorts coupled with his love for the decorative arts made his latent homosexuality rather obvious. With that remark out of the way... I thought that the book was clearly well thought out in its literary nature. The allusions and metaphors concerning other writers were overabundant. I do have a little complaint about the words she uses. In just about every page is a word that no one would ever use in conversation, which I felt was rather odd. It seemed distant in that way, while telling a very personal story. I felt that familiar stink that writing can get when an author uses too many rare words. I understand that the author read a lot of books, that's absolutely obvious without the use of words like "dishabille", "mien",  and "preternatural" peppered in every few pages. I appreciate the use of words like this, but at a certain point it became a little excessive. I respect the use of the appropriate word, but I don't think that good writing is a matter of diction.
It's makes perfect sense that she would relate to her father through books, since it's the only real continuous connecting element she had to him. It's a very word driven book. I never really felt that the images ever contributed their own form of beauty at all. They just illustrated what the words already present or at best elaborated on them. The images were singular in purpose that way, as I often see them in comics. They alleviate the writer from the necessity to describe the setting or the characters and not doing much more than that. This is completely understandable, but I know that this type of art is not what I am attracted to. It feels stilted. I feel like it's a lopsided compromise. The art is compromised due to time constraints so it's not necessarily as beautiful as the world you'd create inside your own head when reading a description, yet at the same time it is used to replace the words that would make a scene beautiful. It's hard to understand who wins when the art is used like that. Honestly, authors describe characters with great specificity and poignant detail. Visual artists can do so as well. Not once in this novel did I ever see a drawing of a character that wasn't generic. At best the visuals sometimes showed a particular character's emotion or domineering stance, but if that were converted to writing it would be amateurish at best.
I'm guessing this is the evidence of my own conflict with some long form comics. It seems that certain examples of it are wholly shortchanged. At once they avoid filling 300 pages with type, yet get a story across. On the other hand they completely abandon visual beauty altogether. A more simplistic look is fine, but it has to serve some significant purpose, which words wouldn't clearly out do them in. The synergy between word and image is the fertile ground that these comics should explore. I don't think that Fun Home did that. I think it was a good graphic novel. It would probably make a better written novel. There were attempts at what I am talking about. She did have some parallel narrative stuff going on, which was mostly words in captions versus speech balloons. She did have some kids say "spread 'um" when pretending to be cops busting in on some illicit card game, while there was a nude painting of a woman with her legs spread on the wall behind them. I don't think cops necessarily open up with the phrase "spread 'um" when they bust perpetrators. I would think "put your hands in the air" or the more out of date "freeze" would have sufficed. The choice she made seemed a tad forced. I also found it interesting how the author was self critical about her literary connections between her life and those great works. I usually enjoy such self reflection, but at the same time it seemed like an attempt to cover all the bases in a sense. In order to appease the more judgmental of us that would challenge her penchant to connect her and her father's lives to that of literary giants. There is an interesting parallel between how she doubted the reasonableness of the connections her english teacher at college made when studying novels and her own tendency to do the same in her own life.

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.

Week 8: Stereotype and the Ethics of Representation

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.

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.

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.

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.