Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kishiro

Battle Angel Alita is a manga that I really enjoyed reading. I feel that in the 6 volumes that I read, the world was established in a beautiful way, where the author almost effortlessly explains what is happening in this world and who this character we are following is both visually and with text. The story deals with huge concepts in a world that is almost surreal in nature, straying so far form reality and skewing traditional structures of society. Within a few hundred pages the author has us thinking about the place of machines in society in addition to the nature of humans after a disaster. A graphic novel like this is definitely my kind of story, because it is both hyper serious and touching on very real and interesting issues, while at the same time takes the time when it can to inject some humor and softness. For example, during the epic fight scene where Alita is fighting one of the machines modeled after her the tension is high and I was on the edge of my seat as the fight scene got more and more dynamic, but immediately after the fight we are treated with a sort of comedown in the form of a funny little dialogue between Alita and a servant robot. Another reason why I really liked this book was it's writing of a respectable main character that is a well developed female protagonist without pandering to anyone. The story is in no way a girl's story because the protagonist is female. I think the decision to make the main character a woman adds an interesting softness to the very cold and harsh world we are entering, without just saying "oh look she's a girl, lets make a joke about how girls have periods cuz girls have periods lol aren't we great?" like the great women artists we got the pleasure of reading about a few weeks later. This author knows what message they want to relay to the audience and seems to never falter in that deliberate treatment of the story. Battle Angel Alita, is just a solid story that makes the viewer think about some very interesting concepts and I think the world building in this novel was the most exemplary part of a great read.

Angel Claw, by MOEBIUS and Jodorowsky

Angel Claw is a surreal and erotic story that strings a collection of Moebius illustrations together with a narrative written by Jodorowsky. This book instantly struck me as being in the same vein as the underground comics we looked at earlier in the semester, but at a much higher caliber illustratively and conceptually. I could describe alot of the underground comics we read as being raunchy and silly, but this book is much darker and unsettling. The tale of Angel Claw shows a girl as she ascends on an ethereal journey, exploring many subjects such as sexuality, dominance, and identity. I enjoy this work in the same way that I do most of the other underground comics, where most people might be too squeamish to appreciate or even read a book like Angel Claw, it is at its core a very self reflective piece. We see an inside look at the uncensored thoughts of both the author and the illustrator. It is the kind of genuine and unabashed reflection that is so interesting to me as a reader. Watching some interviews with Moebius and Jodorowsky they seem like fairly nice and normal people, which makes the work Angel Claw more interesting because we are essentially seeing a pair of creators question "why do I have these thoughts? and what do they mean?". The explorative nature of the story that seems to me like the authors don't really know the full story themselves makes for a very fascinating and engaging experience. Moebius' illustrations are unsettling as hell and to call this imagery erotica is kind of misleading to me because the nature of the interactions in the piece are very dark and disturbing and not very erotic in a traditional sense. Angel Claw at one point finds herself cutting a mans penis off, attaching it to herself, then raping the man she took the penis from. Maybe I'm close minded, but thats not really my thing. Overall the imagery and narrative of the book is one that keeps the reader pressed the entire time and never stops surprising or challenging the reader. The book is dark and unsettling in a psychological way as opposed to a physical way, which I think is very interesting and noteworthy.

Representation... what a topic. Time to take a seat in the Ivory tower and flex our sympathy and morality muscles kids.

To be honest witcha, I see talking about the "issue" of representation of minority groups in mass media to be a vapid and superfluous exercise. I say this because firstly, entertainment and the arts in general are free markets, you can't create laws that make people make the kind of content that you want. The only solution to representation in the media is for you to go make whatever content you want. If you want to see more islamic, half white, urban, girl who has vitiligo and likes golf centric shit then sorry to say, but ur gonna have better luck just making that one yourself than demanding some creative make it for you. It's really boring to me to sit in a classroom with a bunch of other middle to upper class kids who wanna gush about how much they hate nazis and the kkk and how sympathetic they are for minorities. I feel like this kind of discussion is just elitist talk into a vacuum where topics like "Hey look at these ghetto black people, we need to help them because they aren't like MLK" come up. Being a middle class kid I've learned all my life that your race doesn't mean much if you have money. I think you are more likely to relate with someone from your social class than from your racial group. The Boondocks episode about trying to elevate black culture was a prime example of this elitism where the creator feels connected/responsible for a group of people just because of their skin color. Just because you share a skin color with someone doesn't mean you have some special responsibility for them, these people don't have to be freedom riders just because they are black, they can live however they want. My friends and I who were hispanic or black all enjoyed similar shows, similar anime, similar comics, and similar video games. To say that being white defines me as a person more than my upbringing, the area I grew up in, the media I consumed throughout my life, and the people who I've met throughout life just seems naive and thick headed. It's not like just because I'm white I can go up to a fucking kkk member and relate to them, they probably never even watched Naruto. The point I am trying to make is that using representation in popular media is to focus on surface level content rather than deeper meaningful content. I see representation as a cheap sidestepping of competition where, maybe you write a subpar sci-fi space adventure that would never get any acclaim, but slap a minority as the main character and you appeal to a new audience and earn more praise for what I see as a very surface level reason. Take this very school for instance, you see a school with a bunch of areas they can approve upon, but instead of addressing problems like scheduling, housing, or acceptance rates they throw a few banners up saying how "Equal means equal at Ringling" or something like that. This to me is a cheap sidestepping of the schools actual responsibilities in a sense, because they followed a vapid trend in order to get easy approval instead of sinking more resources into fixing more substantial issues at school. Everyone who attends Ringling College has more in common with each other whether they're from Nigeria or South Dakota because they have the means to shell out a quarter million dollars to make pretty pictures, than they do with some random person who is the same race that they are. In entertainment, I firmly believe that focusing on creating more well produced, well thought out, and boundary pushing universal stories that anyone can pick up and relate to is much more progressive than saying, we need to include an equal number of every race in every story ever made. At the end of the day I say just make good shit, and don't pander.

Maus, by Art Spiegelman

At first glance "Maus" is a biographical graphic novel about the father of the author's survival of the holocaust, but I think at the heart of this narrative is the effect that adversity and loss can have on people and their families. In a story dealing with such events as the Holocaust you would think that the hardship of the horrific event would be the main conflict, but this story in my opinion focuses more on the after math of such an event as it's effects creep through time into future generations. My main reason for thinking this is how the story so haphazardly throws away characters, sometimes before I even really knew their name. My experience with the novel "Night", by Elie Wiesel showed the Holocaust in a stomach turning fashion where relationships are broken down and twisted by pure hatred and ignorance and it made me feel the pain of those events and made me empathize with the victims of such a tragedy. In mouse we see a character get introduced and die within pages with little development or attachment established, but I think that this is partly intentional. "Maus" makes the viewer feel a different kind of pain, a less direct pain that one rarely hears or talks about, the subtle pain of surviving a tragedy and having to live on with so much damage. It is made clear that Art's father Vladek's personality has been effected by the events of the Holocaust in ways that make it hard to live a "normal" life. The story constantly presses the viewer with tense interactions between the father and his family. Through these interactions we see the residual damages within the author's father, who is obsessed with money and has trouble accepting his son and wife's actions and behaviors. Spiegelman offers the audience a chance to look at how tragedy can change a person and the awkward and sad reality of trying to deal with that. We as an audience are forced to be a part of this life where you want to love a family member, but some exterior force has made that much harder and  has put you in a place of "I can't stand being around this person, but I know what they've been through so how can I be mad at them?" After reading this book I was somewhat unimpressed by the dry nature of it and the inconsequential stance on the entire issue, but as I write this analysis I can see more of what the author intended and can appreciate this piece much more because of that. 

Quasi at the Quackadero, by Sally Cruikshank

As a whole I found the underground comics unit of our curriculum to be extremely inspiring and motivational. This intrigue was spread across the many comics that we read in class and for home work, but what really stood out to me was the Quasi series of animations by Sally Cruikshank. This animation shows off the true nature of underground media, where the creator is sharing their creation with you as directly as possible. A work like Quasi was not created by a board of men and women in suits, but seems to be a pure creative endeavor. The animated series features non sequitur adventures where most of the narrative is unexplained. Their is no intro explaining the universe we are about to enter, no development of the characters other than what is seen in the story itself. I feel this is an extremely pure and refreshing take on story telling especially in my generation when gender politic garbage and issues of representation bog down almost every form of media. An adventure with Quasi is universal in nature where representation is not a matter of skin color or reproductive organs, but feelings and behaviors. No character really stands out as a main character, and in the few stories we watched in class, most characters fluctuate between lovable, mischievous, and unlikable in the same way that real people are. I feel that the underground movement of this time is something needed in todays social climate due to it's positive "I don't care" attitude, where content isn't made based off market research and tailored to specific trends, but is just what the creators wanted to create. And in the discussion of representation I think abstracted media like Quasi is a great way to liquidate these restrictions. The one scene that sticks out most to me was when Quasi tells Anita to sit in a chair at a party and then pulls the chair from out from under her. This joke is something so universal and border transcending that it struck a chord in me and my friends, making us laugh genuinely at such a simple joke. I think the beauty of the underground movement comes from this spontaneousness and relatability, where you read a story and think "I thought I was the only one thinking like this". It can be a very comforting experience to see that the world isn't some squeaky clean sitcom where everything is okay and no one goes out of line. It's very easy as someone who is going on a non traditional path to think that they are some alien in a world of normal people, but I think the underground comics and animations show how no one is really normal and we all have weird thoughts and feelings, and how that is perfectly fine. I think we need more direct and personable storytelling in today's world, where everyone is thought policed and all ideas that don't meet the standards of liberal morality are fucking purged or persecuted. "He's disgusting for humping that statue of a little girl!" yeah go fuck yourself and come down out of you ivory tower and hang with the real people who have fucked up thoughts and make mistakes and aren't perfect justiciars of peace and humanity.