Week 3: The Comic Strip

Calvin & Hobbes

I read Calvin & Hobbes obsessively as a kid. We'd had the books at my house thanks to my older brothers, and I took full advantage of that. Calvin and Hobbes is an interesting comic strip because while it's a comic about a little kid and his imaginary best friend/stuffed animal written by a grown man, it never feels that way. Calvin's wonder about the world and the way he is doesn't feel forced, it feels natural. It's a testament to Bill Waterson and the way he writes that Calvin and Hobbes can talk about fate and the idea that life is predestined in one strip and have Calvin playing with toys or resisting going to bed in the next strip.  

I think Calvin & Hobbes is a masterful approach to how children can be just as three dimensional and complex as adults without taking itself too seriously. The heart of Calvin & Hobbes is that it's a simple, slice of life type strip that looks into the daily lives of a boy with a big imagination, his favorite toy, and the people around him.

Week 2: A Week of Kindness OR The Seven Deadly Elements Story Interpretation

The Rooster's Laughter AKA Haunted By The Cock

Ernst's series "The Rooster's Laughter" is a series of shocking and slightly ridiculous photos of women being terrorized by roosters in various settings. The series is grotesque, but for anyone familiar with the way men are and have honestly always been, not unfamiliar. The rooster heads drive home the idea that what these men are doing is more animalistic than human.  Some scenes are more out there with their imagery such as the third photo, where the men seem to be robbing a grave of some kind. Others are more common place, and can reflect things women still deal with in the modern world. The seventh photo shows just that, as one of these rooster-man-demon hybrids appears to have scaled an opera house specifically to harass a woman whose body language frankly says "Oh, god, not this shit again."

Easter Island AKA Men Don't Get To Feel Things

From a first pass over of the second series Ernst shows, Easter Island is different from The Roosters Laughter in several ways. The male figures still terrorize women in certain ways, but Easter Island deals more with themes of rejection, sadness, and isolation. The Easter Island heads, called Moai, reflect the idea that men are not allowed to express emotions in ways women can. By literally rendering these men as stone-faced, it creates a veil through which their motivations and their reactions to their actions in the series are unclear. It again disconnects the idea that these men are human, though the figures in Easter Island are shown doing more human like actions in this series. There's also an air of creepiness, particularly in the third photo where one of the Moai-faced men is spying on a woman, and again in whatever is going on in the fourth photo. The final image of Easter Island is also more haunting than any of the other images, with the body language conveying a certain kind of anguish, but the stone face keeping the viewer from really understanding how the character is feeling.