Graphic Fiction and Non-fiction

I wasn't sure what to expect when I went into this week with the headline of “Graphic Fiction and Non-fiction”, but in the reading list I saw the new graphic novel by Craig Thompson, Habibi, so I decided to give it a shot.

I was pretty interested excited when I heard about this book and my interest was pushed further when I saw the amazing design and presentation of the book. I enjoyed Blankets and was pretty intrigued by his take on an arabic love story.  Thompson took a huge leap forward in the art department when he illustrated Habibi, everything is draw with beautifu line quality and variation.  But, even with how awesome it's drawn, at times I did find myself overwhelmed by some of the pages, with not so much room to breathe, basically making me confused on what exactly was occurring.  Thompson obviously did his homework regarding the calligraphy which was prominent through out the whole book, and it looked amazing.

When I read Blankets I was thoroughly invested in the characters, and their very familiar youthful relationship and because of this I was not able to put the book down.  But, Habibi didn't have the same effect for me; I think this is partially because I couldn't relate to their stories as much as I could to Blankets but also because I'm not as knowledgeable about the Qur'an or Arabic culture in general.

Although I was thoroughly impressed by the design and art of the book I decided to look up some reviews of the book and found that a lot of people were bashing on the book for stereotyping. I don't think it's nearly as bad as some of them make it out to be, but I can definitely agree that there is stereotyping.  I don't think it's used in a bad way though, it's more for metaphoric purposes rather than to insult people. I guess some people were complaining that the females were placed entirely for sexual purposes and I don't agree with this.  Every time something sexual occurred in Habibi, it was pretty much a major plot device.

Anyways, I would say Habibi is worth reading if you like Thompson's work or just want to look at something with beautiful illustration, but the story definitely didn't hit home with me like Blankets had.

Comics as Contemporary Literature

This week we consider comics as a form of “Contemporary literature”, by this I'm assuming pieces that fit in this category transcend the comic conventions and can hold their own against any other literature in the traditional sense.  Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli is definitely an example of this, as it could appeal to comic readers (like myself) or anyone that appreciates an incredibly well written and interesting story.

Asterios Polyp is a quick and enjoyable read, but that's not to say it's an easy one.  I never felt like I wasn't being entertained and I read it in a rather small amount of time but, Mazzucchelli packs so much depth and detail into his piece that you really need to read it several times to pick everything up.  There are plenty of perfect scenes within Asterios Polyp, like when the guy on the bus shows Asterios his tattooed lip,  which is seemingly unimportant but really adds a certain dimension to the world that we're reading about.

Not only is there a huge amount of detail and depth to the story, but also the art.  The coloring is reduced to a very limited palette, but it's utilized in a way that couldn't be expressed in any other form of storytelling.  In addition to his supreme use of color Mazzucchelli maintains the same level of attention to his linework and layout designs.  This is obvious in the scene where Aterios and Hana's relationship is falling apart and his body is simplified reduced geometric shapes and her body and room around her is a shifting sketchy mess, presenting both of their emotions and personalities perfectly without actually saying them. Also, I found it especially appealing that each character seemed to be drawn in a style of their own according to what type of character they were.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel in it's entirety, though like I mentioned before I think I'll have to read atleast once more to really grasp the smaller ideas that are strewn across the perfectly designed pages.  I also kind of have a suspicion that the story itself would hold an even higher appreciation if the reader had previous knowledge of architectural history and possibly even an understanding of postmodern sculpture, but I think it's a pretty fine comic without it.

Wide World of Comics

This week we're studying the “Wide World of Comics” which I'm just assuming is a way of introducing new and exciting comics from all around the world that we wouldn't otherwise be aware of.  This week I read the extremely well done Blacksad by writer Juan Diaz Canales and artist Juanjo Guarnido, both of whom are Spanish, but were targeting the French market.

First of all it's impossible to read Blacksad and not notice how gorgeous the art is, every page, every panel is a beautiful illustration with perfect textures and composition.  Guarnido knows what he's doing, every character is fully able to be read through posture, facial expression, and he even chooses just the right animals for the job(That's right I said animal).  Every character in this series is a humanoid animal, some more human than others (I noticed the female characters often had more human characteristics especially in their figure), but I think the anthropomorphic quality to these characters just add a certain quality that you couldn't get with a different medium.  Going this route allows the authors to basically tell these well written noir detective tales with a more exaggerated and expressive quality then they would have other wise.

The writing style is perfectly blended with the setting and what you would comic to expect with a noir piece, which is a good thing. I thought it was interesting that given the 1950's noir setting where a lot of the verbal expressions would include animal tie-ins such as, “you dirty rat”, and the character would literally be a rat.  I thought the detective stories were pretty entertaining, and well written but they weren't the most original mysteries I'd ever heard of.  But with a piece of this caliber it didn't actually detract from my overall enjoyment.  The script and illustrative quality is at such a level that I could easily this having been made up of stills from an animated movie by Disney's dark older brother.

Anyways, on to “Comics as Contemporary Literature”, oh and before I go here's one of my favorite shots from the first issue, the lighting and drama connected to it are so well done I couldn't help but share.

Manga

Manga is the japanese word for all comics but in the west it has come to refer to the comics created specifically in japan.  Normally I wouldn't think it's appropriate to categorize things by where it's made, because it should just be looked at for it's storytelling and art, but in Japan comics are integrated in everyone's lives from a very young age.  This is a sharp contrast to how comics are viewed in the west.  In the United States especially comics have always been sort of a “nerdy” thing, but more recently with the Marvel and DC movies comics have become to evolve into something more accepted and mainstream, but definitely not a way of life like they are in Japan.

Definitely my favorite type of comics, as I've read everything from traditional shonen manga such as DragonBall and several series in Weekly Shonen Jump, historical fantasies like Vagabond and Rurouni Kenshin, and brutal science fiction like Gantz.  I think the appeal of manga is the fact that it's so clean and the comics are seen as more of an art form with perfect compositions in every panel and the attractive black and white line art.

This week I read several titles, but I think I'll focus on Buddha by Osamu Tezuka, and write about the others in an additional post.  Although I've read tons of manga and continue to keep up with a multitude of weekly serializations I've oddly never read any thing by the God of comics himself.  I'm obviously familiar with his works such as Astro Boy(but never read it) and I've even watched/read series that closely follow Tezuka's style like Cyborg 009 and Kikaider.

Buddha, was a great read with a perfectly paced story, compelling characters, interesting plot elements, and that classic style that's instantly recognized as Tezuka.  In Buddha the reader will find every classic manga aesthetic with a hero's journey to evolve and make a new life, a heroine in need of help, super exaggerated facial expressions, and japanese referential humor mixed in.  These aren't the only defining points of Tezuka's work, but it's obvious that he played a key factor in patenting most of these characteristics in the comic form in Japan.  The entire time I was reading Buddha I would see these comparisons to other manga and I'd think to myself “oh! That's where that came from” and I think that was a really cool experience for me, to go back and find out a sort of history of what I love to read. 

I think it's interesting that there is so much nudity in this manga, especially the younger characters. I think it's just more accepted in Japan as a culture than it would be to the western audience, and I've seen it in many other Japanese manga/anime across the board, and never in something produced in the United States.  It's also, like many shonen manga, relatively violent with characters experiencing extreme amounts of hardship in their lives, even though it's written for a seemingly younger audience.  This convention is usually exclusive to manga, but I've noticed in recent years traditional American comics are infusing some of these elements into their own pieces.

Anyways, time to move on, I'm going to post an additional post on manga as I've also read, Mushishi and Blade of the Immortal.

Stereotype and the Ethics of Representation

This week was all about Stereotype and the Ethics of Representation and how comics utilize the function of a stereotype and may even be dependent on them.  In class we studied how often stereotypes are used in comics and other mediums, and in my mind often this is to get a character or message across to the reader most clearly and effectively,  despite the opposing view points that were expressed during the class discussion.  These stereotypes had to have come from some where to begin with and working with people at my job, everyday I see these generalizations or more often than not true.  I have thought about the fact that because my pre-existing knowledge of these stereotypes I may be subconsciously looking for them to be true, but I don't think this is the case as I'm not really biased towards one way or the other so why would I bend what I'm seeing to be a specific way.  Anyways that being said I did read a comic for this week! One that I quite enjoyed in fact, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang.

Yang has crafted a brilliant graphic novel that relies heavily upon a complex narrative that consists of 3 separate and compelling stories that all run parallel and eventually tie together by the end of the book.  Each one has similar themes of self-awareness and how the characters look at themselves to form their own identities.  I have some what of a bias towards anything that includes the story of the Monkey King, which has been used in countless things through out history, from the animations of "Journey to the West", to things a little more subtle but still obvious like Akira Toriyama's Dragonball(One of my favorite manga of all time by the way).  So Yang's graphic novel instantly had me hooked when I saw his use of the Monkey King's story as a sort of parallel story to the main protagonist Jin Wang.

Jing Wang's story is still compelling, it's interesting how Yang is able to weave all the little subtle issues a young chinese person would have assimilating into American culture.  He does this in a light hearted way such as when the teacher mispronounces his name and then he corrects and then she corrects.  Just this little scene it was easy to identify with the situation because I've watched this exact occurrence happen a ton of times to my friend Rani growing up because of his different ethnic background.

Finally we come to the all-american Danny who's fed up with his super blatant chinese stereotype of a cousin Chin-Kee.  I think Chin-Kee was a super funny character and kind of shows the reader that the overly ridiculous chinese stereotype is a huge contrast to the much more realistic portrayal of an actual person of asian decent living in America.  It's interesting to find that Danny is actually what has become of Jing as he tries to deny his Chinese heritage to avoid any more harassment.  Here is where the reader should have a recollection of the foreshadowing that Yang uses in the beginning of the novel where Jing wants to become a “Transformer” and all he has to do is sell his soul; This is a spectacular use of foreshadowing.

Overall, I really enjoyed this novel and I'm glad I read it, I didn't quite care for the ending as much as I had hoped, because I just wanted to keep reading, but it didn't ruin the experience for me.  Next week is manga! Definitely my favorite form of comics!

Maus

I went into Maus by Art Spiegelman expecting a complete masterpiece, and though I did enjoy it throughly, I wasn't blown away.  I think what's most interesting about Maus is that it joins something that's typically thought to be lighthearted, the comic book(graphic novel), with a story of pure evil, the holocaust, and makes it work almost perfectly.  The first half of Maus was interesting and kept me reading, though there were a few dry spells, but the entire second half of the book from Auschwitz and beyond kept me thoroughly entertained without question.

The story is without a doubt the reason one would read Maus.  The story is broken up into 2 stories really, one the father's and the second, the author's own story as he's gathering the actual info in order to write the book.  I feel like the seamless play between the 2 stories is a clear highlight of this novel.  Both stories are incredibly well-written and interesting on their own accord and Spiegelman is able to weave them both together to create one smooth flowing narrative that entertains the reader through out the novel. I found the use of foreshadowing to be pretty interesting how for instance the author's father is revealed to have died, but it continues to show their in-person conversations and then finally reverting to the rest of the novel being created through tape recording. Not only is each part well written, but I think there are quite a few pages that really inspire the reader and give them a reason to reflect upon life, like this one:

This page really shows both the determination of humans to live and what gives them this strength, and at the same time human's total dependency on others.

Spiegelman is absolutely an awesome story teller that much is for sure, but I can't say the same for his art which is far too crude for my tastes and I often found myself not knowing which character was which.  This could probably be attributed to the fact that the characters were depicted as animals based on there nationality, giving them all a much more similar look than that of humans.  I'm not saying that I didn't find this an interesting and unique decision, but I think it came off as more of a novelty in my eyes, rather than an innovation.  I say this because not only did I have trouble distinguishing characters half the time, but other than some specific cases of extreme emotion, the characters showed hardly any, which really made some of the scenes lack the feeling and emotion I think the reader would get with more realistic human expression.  This kind of makes me question Spiegelman's reasoning behind the use of animals and the only conclusion I can come to is the need to simplify and still give it that comic book feel.

Overall I found Maus to be an enjoyable experience, not my favorite graphic novel by any means but definitely time well spent, and pretty educational for someone that isn't well versed in the history of the Holocaust.

...And here's a final panel to give you nightmares for the rest of your life:

Underground Comics

Underground comics, definitely not my cup of tea.  I struggled through some of the awful ones on the course resource page to find out that none of them really caught my attention.  Most of them were littered with extremely poor illustration and juvenile storytelling with not much of a purpose other than to make a disgusting sexual reference or throw out a racial slur and then move on to the next one.   I noticed from the class blog that most of our study would be centered around Robert Crumb.  So, I took the initiative and gathered up some of his comics, mostly “Mr. Natural” and got to reading.  Come to find out Crumb wasn't much better than the rest.

I say this because though he has relatively better craft and illustrative quality in comparison to most of the other underground comic illustrators, his material never says anything more than cheap blatantly racist and extremely immoral sexual references and acts.  I found this to be completely uninteresting in pretty much every aspect.  Come to find out he was taking hard drugs the entire time he was writing/illustrating these comics, which I can't personally respect either, as I'm much more of a hard working person that believes in full coherent understanding of your work and surroundings rather than relying on a substance to do the work for you.  I'm not even sure how some of these were thought to be acceptable for publishing as some of the acts just seemed so outrageous that I don't feel comfortable reiterating them on my blog.

I know I'm generalizing a lot when I write this, because I'm sure not every underground comic is like this, though from what I've looked at, it seems the majority is. During class I “read” one that I thought was interesting, it had decent art that had obviously been inspired by traditional comics but still had a sort of amateurish feel.  But, what made it interesting was not the art, but the fact that it contained no words, but it was really easy to follow panel to panel, and even included some memory scenes. I respect the scene for the fact that it put comics back into the hands of readers during a time when the industry was lagging.

Anyways, I think that's about all I can say about Underground comics, but I've already began reading “Maus” for next week and I'm really enjoying that one, so look forward to my thoughts on that!