Week 7: Maus Analysis/Response

Maus by Art Spiegleman

Maus is a graphic novel by Art Spieglman about his father's life before and during World War II, specifically during the Holocaust. Speilgeman employs interesting visual representations of different races/ethnicities in Maus - he depicts Jewish people as mice, while Germans and Poles are depicted as cats and pigs. Throughout the story, this type of representation occasionally deliberately falls through, such as when Spieglman is wondering whether or not to portray his wife, a french woman who converted to Judaism, as a mouse or not.

Maus is also one of, if not, the first graphic novel to be seriously considered in an academic context. Comics have a history of being considered non-academic and frivolous, but Maus changed that due to it's subject matter and artful storytelling. It paved the way for comics of a more serious/historical context, like March, a comic about the civil rights movement. It gave academics a chance to realize that comics can be useful tools in order to teach, giving them a new way to engage people.

All in all, Maus is a well done and beautiful story, it's look into a life of someone who lived through a time of widespread tragedy and the relationship between a father and son.

Week 6: Underground Comics

Underground Comics

Underground comics are where artists have the most fun, I'm guessing. For this post I read Tits and Clits, Whiteman, and a bit of Mr. Natural. The overt sexuality in a lot of underground comics is combined with weird scenarios that make reading them a really fun experience. 

Whiteman is a really fun twist on the Beauty and The Beast trope where the woman, in a rare occasion, is The Beast. Tits and Clits is a really fun anthology type comic that features several different artists, all of whom are women. Mr. Natural, I found, was the most boring to me, to the point that after a few comics I couldn't be bothered to read more.

Underground comics have more freedom than mainstream comics, and because of that the content tends to be more outrageous than anything you would find in the mainstream. Anthologies like Tits and Clits also give female artists a platform to display their skill while writing fun short stories about sexuality - a subject most women in general are discouraged from publicly speaking about. Underground comics give people and stories a chance to be heard that they wouldn't have if they tried publishing their work for a general audience.

Week 5: Body Talk - Eisner and Thompson

Blankets by Craig Thompson

I read Blankets at 17 years old via my best friend, who loved the comic so much she not only recommended it to me, but showed up at my house with the book and insisted i have my own copy. At the time, Blankets was more interesting than most stories I was reading. Thompson and I come from slightly similar religious backgrounds, though the way our parents raised us was completely different. I wasn't forced into religion or guilted by it as Thompson is, which allows me to have a healthy relationship with religion. 

Thompsons art is technically masterful while still creating a unique visual style, which is always nice to see. The way he depicts emotions in Blankets can be visceral at times while leaving a lasting impression in his readers minds.

While I have some issues with the way Thompson depicts Raina, his first love, I think I can ultimately be a little too harsh in my feelings on this. I'm so used to seeing women idealized and deified - something Thompson cheekily draws out in Blankets - that as an adult, I'm a little quicker to write off that aspect of Blankets then I was when I was 17. Thompson ultimately treats Raina with more respect and adoration than most female characters are given by their creators.

What I loved so much about Blankets when I initially read it, and what has kept me returning to it time and time again, is that Thompson is so open about who he is and his experiences. You can't help but root for the guy, seeing how his life plays out, and hoping it goes well. It left me with such an affection for someone who doesn't even know I exist!

Week 4: Comic Books

Uncle Scrooge, The Secret of Atlantis

Discussing Carl Barks in class made me interested in checking out more of his work. I read his Uncle Scrooge story, The Secret of Atlantis. It was really silly and fun! I liked the take on the people of atlantis adapting to their new home and becoming weird not quite mermaid aliens. I think it's easy to forget that comic books aren't just superheroes and the latest stressful plot about how they're going to save the world from whatever type of evil is popular that week, and this is a cute reminder that things other then that exist.
It was definitely a fun short story with a lot of personality, as is most of Carl Bark's work with the disney ducks.

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.

Week 2: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

Understanding Comics

While reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, there was one idea in particular that caught my interest. It was McCloud's six step theory. McCloud claims that whether an artist realizes it or not, they will always follow these six steps that he has laid out: Idea/Purpose, Form, Idiom, Structure, Craft and Surface.

I had never thought of artistic growth as a process that was trackable, besides the obvious tracking of quality and growth of your work, so to see it laid out in this way was really interesting to me. The examples he used to show how artists grew and maybe, for some of them, settled into different steps without progressing was interesting as well - I liked that even though it was a six step process, it wasn't necessary to complete the entire cycle to be satisfied with your work and your artistic identity. McCloud doesn't look down on artists who settle into earlier stages of the six step process.

As we proceed on through the six steps, he presents steps 1 and 2 as choices. Step 2 is Form, where an artist can push the limits of their work and art in general and see what they/art as a whole are capable of - McCloud lists examples of artists who do this such as Windsor McCay and Moebius.

Step 1 is Idea/Purpose, where an artist's art becomes a tool with which they can effectively tell a story with, like Charles Shulz or Will Eisner. 

While McCloud presents these two steps as choices, he does make it clear that neither choice is permanent if the artist doesn't wish it to be. I really like that McCloud's six steps can flow into one another and aren't extremely restrictive, or even need to be followed in order. There's a certain freedom to the six step theory he presents that instead of making it seem like a checklist of things an artist MUST do, it rather seems more like a natural order of things that happens to an artist organically. 

Ideas and form are important to an artist, and comics in particular. You cannot have one without the other, and by laying it out so simply, McCloud helps us, the reader, truly understand this.