Manga (revised)

It was interesting because I started reading Mushishi and then stopped about two pages in and found myself watching the anime a few days later. After enjoying the first three episodes of the anime I went back to read the manga and was overjoyed by how well the anime stuck to the source material of the manga. I ended up reading the first 5 chapters or so of the manga. The art style got a little frustrating at times mainly due to very odd looking feet. The story felt like a really traditional japanese myth sort of thing and that made it sort of serene yet intoxicating. Also the episodic feel of each chapter was really interesting and became more so when events from previous chapters culminated in a later one.

Adolf was something rather different. After reading the synopsis I was very curious to how the story would go about. I only read about a volume and a half I believe and when struck me immediately was that this manga was actually flipped to read left to right for translation which seemed very odd to me. I found Adolf to be very entrancing and quite tense at times. It was a view on the time of the holocaust that isn't often seen which is that of those living in Japan during the earlier days of the War. Tezuka's style was quite apparent and actually made the story more interesting. While some character looked fairly tame there were the few who had the very exaggerated features which lent to their personalities greatly.


I've read a few mangas previous to being in this class. I've read the entirety of Death Note (which has some of my favorite artwork ever in manga. Same artist as Hikaru No Go and Bakuman), Full Metal Alchemist, and Buso Renkin (by the same author of Rurouni Kenshin). I also have kept up with reading Bleach on an almost regular basis even though the story continues to get more ridiculous. I think what draws me into Manga and Anime on an on and off basis is the subjects of the various plots and the character design. It just appeals to me in a strange way that I can't really avoid it. Maybe because I'm not an illustrator nor do I see myself with the potential to ever be one that the super stylized look of a lot of manga appeals to me.

Dr. McNinja, Axe Cop, and so many more

I was really excited for the class about webcomics. Most of my favorites bar in my web browser is webcomics and I wrote a research paper on the realities of making a living through webcomics last year. I picked up webcomics quite a few years ago with some simple easy to follow things such as Cyanide and Happiness and VGCats. I didn't necessarily read them every time they updated and wasn't 100% into them all the time, but it was enjoyable and Cyanide and Happiness especially gave me something to look forward to each day with their daily updates. It wasn't until about 2 years ago or so that I really started branching out. VGCats (of which I don't follow anymore) had their featured comic as MS Paint Adventures and it looked very interesting. It ended up being a long read to catch up, but the current story at the time Problem Sleuth was way worth it. The site ran as a pseudo-game when reader based suggestions for actions led the characters along. When that site launched merchandise it was released on a site called Topatoco, a hub for web comic creators to host the merchandise for their comics. Through that site I found a fun comic entitled Dr. McNinja. I've been following Dr. McNinja ever since I've found it and have read every story up to the present with the exception of the few print-only stories. Dr. McNinja runs in the form of adding a new page to the existing story with each update. When a story is complete it reads like any other comic you would find at a bookstore or comic shop. After a few stories are completed they would be compiled into books. Recently Dr. McNinja has been picked up by Dark Horse and the most recent book was published by them. Dark Horse also picked up another similar comic, Axe Cop. Axe Cop is by far the most ridiculous thing I've read in a while mainly due to how the comic is made. The artist of Axe Cop has his 5 year-old brother write Axe Cop and thus the craziness that only a small child can think of becomes a very well drawn comic that packs many a laugh.

I think I've gone on for a little too long with this, but I absolutely adore webcomics. Others I have read include: Pictures for Sad Children (apparently on a hiatus), Bearmageddon (a comic written and drawn by the artist of Axe Cop), Romantically Apocalyptic (which uses photography and photoshop to create the artwork), Brawl in the Family (a comic based solely on Nintendo characters with Kirby being the primary series used), and Allan Comic (an autobiographical comic which chronicles an important event of the day in the form of a four panel comic). Webcomics allow for so many different subjects and are extremely accessible making them quite a joy and a great source of entertainment in my life.

Watchmen

When I first read Watchmen I had originally done so to have read it before seeing the movie, which was close to coming out at the time. However I ended up finishing the book and never going to see the movie and didn't see the movie until much later when it had come out on DVD. Going back and re-reading it was just as much of an enjoyable experience as it was the first time around. The thing I really feel sets Watchmen apart from a lot of graphic novels is the inclusion of the more text based reading at the end of each chapter plus the whole comic in a comic thing with the pirate story that reflected on the main story of Watchmen. My favorite part of the entire story is at the end when Ozymandias finishes his monologue about his plan and then reveals that he would not have given the heroes the pleasure of the monologue if there were any chance of them stopping his plans. That moment to me is one of those spine tingling moments that really defines an amazing story. I haven't read many of Alan Moore's other works but I did get a glimpse at what is From Hell. Unfortunately I didn't have the time to get all too far into From Hell and had to put it away prematurely. That moment at the end of Watchmen though is one of my favorite moments in any story from any medium ever.

Asterio's Polyp

This comic really surprised me. The art style was absolutely wonderful. The little nuances with the way every character spoke in a different font and how Asterio would be represented by geometric forms while his wife was represented by sketchy lines were all wonderful. Much like American Born Chinese this story was told in parallel timelines that interwove themselves together by the end of the book. I feel like as a whole I could call this book an artistic graphic novel experience. There were so many different variations on how different parts of the story were told and all of it seemed very ingenius. I feel as though this is the first comic I've read that really takes advantage of the fact that it is a comic and uses it to play around with the way it tells the story. I found this to be an amazingly enjoyable read.

Persepolis

I'll admit right out that I didn't get to read all the way through, but I read a decent amount of the first volume. Originally the art style for this one turned me off of wanting to read it, however I eventually put that aside and I was glad I did. I feel like reading Persepolis was way more educational than anything else I read in this class. I felt enlightened on so many subjects about things that happened outside of this country after reading just the earlier parts of Persepolis. Although there were all these wonderful things in the book I found myself getting kind of bored of it pretty fast. It seemed to repeat over itself a lot and got really boring in spots. So much so that I pretty much just put it down in the middle of reading and never got back to it. It was good to see this kind of graphic novel though because it really showed how much a comic can actually teach us without even using really complicated art.

Manga: Mushishi and Adolf

It was interesting because I started reading Mushishi and then stopped about two pages in and found myself watching the anime a few days later. After enjoying the first three episodes of the anime I went back to read the manga and was overjoyed by how well the anime stuck to the source material of the manga. I ended up reading the first 5 chapters or so of the manga. The art style got a little frustrating at times mainly due to very odd looking feet. The story felt like a really traditional japanese myth sort of thing and that made it sort of serene yet intoxicating. Also the episodic feel of each chapter was really interesting and became more so when events from previous chapters culminated in a later one.

Adolf was something rather different. After reading the synopsis I was very curious to how the story would go about. I only read about a volume and a half I believe and when struck me immediately was that this manga was actually flipped to read left to right for translation which seemed very odd to me. I found Adolf to be very entrancing and quite tense at times. It was a view on the time of the holocaust that isn't often seen which is that of those living in Japan during the earlier days of the War. Tezuka's style was quite apparent and actually made the story more interesting. While some character looked fairly tame there were the few who had the very exaggerated features which lent to their personalities greatly.

American Born Chinese

This comic really surprised me. The art style's simplicity intrigued me from the get go and I was a little confused about what I was reading when I first started. It became apparent that this was one of those "you'll get it at the end" kind of stories about half way through. Overall I enjoyed this story greatly. Learning that all the stories had a connection at the end was really fun and the idea that the main character actually took on the appearance of Danny in his mind was quite surprising. Stories with twists such as that always get me for some reason and this was no exception. I was thoroughly pleased with American Born Chinese. The three parallel stories made the book infinitely more interesting than it would have been if the timeline was linear. The little artistic quirks such as the jolt of confidence represented as the lightning cloud hair was quite humorous and clever. I also enjoyed how simple this read was while at the same time being highly complex and intricate. I can really appreciate stories like that.

MAUS

I had heard a lot of good things about Maus before I signed up for this class. When I read through the syllabus and saw that we'd be reading it I was slightly excited. All I knew about Maus before reading it was that it was about the holocaust, the jews were mice, the germans were cats, and the americans were dogs. When I actually started reading Maus I ended up seeing something I never expected.

It was very clear from the get go that Maus was about itself being made. Instantly that caught my attention. I had no idea this story was an actual telling of somebody's life during the holocaust. I found myself wrapped in the storytelling quite quickly. The story felt so wonderfully real even though every character had become an animal. I felt more interested in learning about the holocaust than I had in a long time.

Spiegelman did amazing things with the way he illustrated his story. He constantly goes back and forth between what is the holocaust story and what is the learning of the story in present day. I feel like if you were to tell someone that the story goes back and forth to present day and flashbacks every other panel they would think that sounds confusing. It does sound confusing, but somehow when reading the story I never found myself getting lost between the two settings. It feels as seamless as a movie.

I found myself enjoying the first volume a lot more than the second volume. There was a really nice balance between the holocaust story and the present day story in the first volume. It maintained that balance all the way through the volume. Even though the holocaust story was more of the before the camps in volume one, it was definitely more interesting to hear. In the second volume the side of the story about the story took over most of the volume and I found myself hating it more and more as I went along. It got old fast. The second volume was riddled with how much Art couldn't stand his father and that all he wanted from the man was his story. The turning point from the end of the first volume shows reason for this behavior, but it's still really over the top and annoying.

There were a lot of small artistic nuances throughout Maus which made it even more lovely. Such things as the masks of other animals when pretending to be something else and the idea that people could just tell that you were a jew somehow. It was all very fascinating. I think my opinion on this whole Maus story has to fall on the line of I loved the first act, however the second act was lacking in that strong appeal the first one had.

Underground Comics

I didn't know what to expect with Underground Comics. It became strikingly clear when I was looking at the titles on the resource page. I remember the first thing I saw was "Tijuana Bibles" and I thought to myself, "Where have I heard that before?" After that I went and downloaded a whole bunch of the titles. Some of them for their name more than others. I feel like it should've been obvious that Underground and vulgar, sexual things would go hand in hand. The comics I read before class didn't really stick with me much. I remember reading the Tits and Clits comic and being very surprised by most the subject matter. When I actually took a look at the Tijuana bibles I remembered where I'd heard of them before, Watchmen. If I recall correctly, in both the book and the movie, Watchmen, Silk Specter is given a Tijuana Bible about herself as a gift and she appreciates the thought. If I had remembered this just a little sooner I'm sure I wouldn't have been as caught off guard with the underground comics as I was. The whole idea of Underground comics got weirder when I was reading some book about a little green dinosaur in class. This cutesy little dino would be going around history for some weird reason and all of a sudden he would be having sex with some random girl. As I progressed further it got weirder when there was even an orgy scene where some of the characters were saying "Hooray for Underground Comics!"

Underground comics are weird... I'm a little confused as who the target market really was.

Blankets

Craig Thompson's Blankets was an strange read. Almost immediately into reading I picked up on a high sense of melodrama. The story kept me constantly on edge of whether I actually enjoyed it or not. Thompson's ability to seamlessly integrate the reality with the imagination in the beginning of the first chapter were very interesting. Specifically page 16 where their Dad opens the bed in the cubby hole and to the child the bed looks like the jaws of a vicious alligator. The idea of furniture becoming monsters was something I could relate to from my childhood. In a way that scene got me enticed in the story very quickly. The page following it Thompson uses the negative space on the page to create a nice stark focus on the last panel which he gave no hard edges to show a sense of despair sinking in.

The realization of how tight Thompson was surrounded by Christianity became very apparent in an odd humorous way. Near the end of the book on page 516 there's a scene where two adults talk about how one kid who went to art school after taking a figure drawing class became homosexual. The panel where the gentleman says "Homosexuality" is so wonderfully drawn. The two adults are so sorrowful and serious and upset at the idea of homosexuality. At the same time in an amazing contrast Thompson's face reads the expression, "Wow these people are ridiculous." What really amazed me was how I could read that expression even though his face is so simply drawn.

Thompson definitely captured a lot of emotion in Blankets. What I think makes me think I liked the book was how he was able to do it with such a simplistic art style, yet at the same time there were moments where the art style was anything but simple. However, I'm not sure if I'm the biggest fan of just how emotional the book gets at points. Especially parts of the end of the book... it just got a bit too... over dramatic.

Early Comic Books

Reading the first Superman in Action Comics there was one thing that really stood out to me. The dialogue and narration felt very similar to that of which typical radio broadcasts sounded like. It was very apparent in the first page of the comic. The numerous exclamation points made me read the text in the voice of a radio narrator and in the way the narrator would in the old Superman cartoons. The different colored boxes made  me read them in different tones as well. I'm not sure if this was what was planned but either way it effected the way I read it. The fact that reading this comic felt so much like reading a comic from today was astounding to me. I really liked reading the Superman comic and the other few early comic books I read.

When I read the Swamp Thing comic in class I got a different taste of the genres that early comics covered. The idea behind the comic being about you and reading in the 2nd person was something I didn't think would've been used so early in comics. It was definitely a surprise and it made the reading much more enjoyable when I was able to sort of take in the emotions of each character separately, yet as myself.

Comic Strips (Reflection)

Comic strips have a strange sense to them. Before class I had read a bunch of Peanuts strips and the comparison between them and the strips we read in class was astonishing. For some reason the Peanuts strips make more sense to me than those of Krazy Kat and Dream of a Rarebit Fiend. Dream of a Rarebit Fiend definitely had something it was trying to accomplish by appealing to the readers with a situation that they may relate to. Krazy Kat on the other hand just made no real sense to me whatsoever. I tried to grasp the idea behind Krazy Kat, but it honestly just seemed like a recurring story with the same characters. I'm sure if I was alive back when Krazy Kat was being printed I might be able to understand it a little better, but honestly I believe that it really hasn't held up all too well over the years. Peanuts made way more sense to me as most the strips had a much simpler and always relatable meaning.

Comic Strips (Class)

Dream of a Rarebit Fiend

- Last panel always contains a person in a state of having just woken up. They are usually disturbed by their dream.
- The dream panels contain more and more information leading up to the transition into the woken dreamer panel. A build up as if there's about to be some sort of explosion.
- Typically a lack of setting in the dream sequences. No real sense of background or strange background
- First panel usually has a sense of realism that quickly degenerates into madness.

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Krazy Kat

- Lots of setting. It's pretty clear where the characters are in terms of what's around them.
- Transitions tend to go from setting to setting depending on the story.
- More text and speech among characters and in single panels.
- The layout of panels changes with almost every comic.
- Panels are numbered to avoid confusion.
- Text is varying and when there is less text in bubbles it seems to have less importance.

Understanding Comics

Scott McCloud posed a lot of very interesting ideas in Understand Comics. By far out of all the ideas he posed the one that definitely had me thinking differently afterward was his segment on the different types of panel-to-panel transitions. I've read a few comics and graphic novels, and considerably more manga, and have never really thought about what happens between panels. I've always just understood the passing of time or the scene changes as it is something you can easily get accustomed to by watching TV or movies. With this newfound knowledge McCloud has passed onto me I'm sure I'll never really read comics the same way I used to ever again. I'm bound to be re-reading pages to note the different kinds of panel transitions and when I see something rather unusual for comics I'll be some sort of giddy over knowing what it can be called. McCloud had other really good points in Understanding Comics, but none of them really effected me as a reader such as this.

Ernst Trasnlation

Panel 1: Rooster mocks those without balance by easily standing on to of and egg.

Panel 2: Rooster and Rooster-man looking over a dead body. They seem indifferent about the situation.

Panel 3: Rooster-men burying the dead. They are questioning the undressing woman.

Panel 4: Rooster-men are inspecting the items left behind by the dead. They unearthed a body to do so.

Panel 5: The Roosters have murdered the woman. The Rooster-man in the doorway is very troubled and hurt by this action.

Panel 6: Rooster-man is trying to enter the room. The man is pushing a wardrobe up against the door in order to keep out the Rooster-man.

The Arrival

     Words help us understand stories in our own language and culture, but pictures are universal. Shaun Tan's The Arrival paints a strong and wonderful tale of an immigrant entering a world that is unfamiliar and at sometimes a scary place. Every page moves the story along in a very straightforward motion with no real confusion at all. As bizarre as some of the imagery is, the landscapes and odd objects and foreign language really help in expressing how difficult it can be to communicate in and to discover a new city in a foreign land. The changes in tone are clearly expressed through changes in brightness in each panel as the happier moments have a strong glow while the darker and sadder moments are expressed by heavier shadows and bleak scenery. Each chapter has a clear transition and explores a different step in the cycle of immigrating to a new land. Facial expressions become an essential tool to understand the characters and to explore the narrative of Tan's story. By using repetition to show the before and after of events, The Arrival at times feels less like an ordinary comic and more of a movie split into separate stills. Words have never been necessary to tell a story, whether it be in a comic or in a film, because images get across more in just one panel or still than words could get across in several paragraphs. Shaun Tan's The Arrival makes this quite clear in it's wonderful storytelling in the form of a wordless comic.