Webcomics and the Fyutcha of Comics

The world of the web is one with little to no rules and the people can really decide what becomes popular and what doesn't. There is no publishers or distributors dictating how or what content is produced. This environment is one that is very freeing and one that I am very greatful exists. As a kid in highschool I was able to produce my own web comic and chuck it on an open site for comics and I managed to actually get people looking at my comic. All I needed was my own energy and for nothing I got my comic online and in front of eyeballs. I think that this is an extremely powerful thing and I see the web/social media become more and more intertwined within the art community. This obviously puts a different set of rules on how people find and consume content and this is leading to an evolution of what an artist needs to do to really get noticed, but I think its for the better. If you have great art, you are much more likely to find an audience today with the internet than you were in the times of Winsor McCay. 

This is penetrating the games as well where AAA studios are shitting the bed year after year losing money and support from fans and indie studios are dropping hits from out of nowhere and changing the definition of games. Very exciting time to be alive for sure.

Sin City: The Hard Goodbye, by Frank Miller

Reconsidering the Superhero

The work of Frank Miller is one example of many that illustrates the concept of the "Reconsidered Superhero". Along with works such as Hellboy, Rumble, and Black Science I feel the art form has grown tired of the old school, perfect hero type and has reinvented the idea of a super powered protagonist. In these books we usually don't see the super powered indestructible hero types as we did in earlier comic books. Nowadays it seems that the underground concepts of injecting real emotion and thought into characters has seeped into the mainstream of comics for what I feel is for the better. Seeing Superman or Wolverine fight some bad guy for the 500th time really makes the medium feel less impactful in my mind. These superheroes become more of a stable vehicle to deliver light hearted stories or messages to the audience. In a work like Sin City, we are presented with someone who has no super powers and we have no idea what the outcome will be in the story. Marv greatest strength is his determination and features many flaws that are highlighted throughout the story. The book reads to me like the inner monologue of someone who just got yelled at by a teacher and is now thinking about all the comebacks he could have said in the moment but didn't. It's a frustrated tale and a gritty one as well that presents a fantastic adventure that is very much stepped in reality. The "villains" are corrupted people who are often evaluated by our "hero" as to whether or not they deserve to be killed. Our hero doesn't see himself as the hero and he is constantly grappling with his purpose and the justification behind his actions. Overall, within this first volume of Sin City we see our "Superhero" on a quest to basically die in peace with no regret, as opposed to saving the city or the world. It's a selfish goal that leaves many others hurt, but it's a realistic one that I think many people can relate to. This book does not gloss over the hard realities of life such as, everyone isn't going to like you, and that staying determined is extremely difficult, and that right and wrong is rarely black and white. The unstable nature of this book made me read through the entire thing when I just wanted to skim and is also what kept me on my toes the entire time. This book is not titled "MARV" it's "Sin City", it doesn't glorify the hero of the story it merely lets us watch his story as it all unfolds and we can choose whether he was right or wrong in the end.

I think that this kind of character/world writing is extremely interesting where we as the audience are brought into a world because the writer allowed us to, where he doesn't owe us anything. We don't come in expecting super man to save the world or anything of the sort, we get to explore human emotions from a safe distance and reflect on them. I recently played a game called ABZU with my bud, and it in the same way just dropped us into a world and we got to explore and make our own judgements. The game didn't tell you what was going on, but rather let us reflect on the presented narrative and come to our own conclusions. I plan on including this type of world/character development into my work.

Pretty Deadly, by Kelly Sue Deconnick VS Rat Queens, by Kurtis J. Wiebe

Comics by Women

Looks like we're gonna go round 2 on the concept of representation or as I see it, pandering. I highlighted the two books above as I read them as they released a few years ago. Pretty Deadly is a great book, Rat Queens however, is an exhausting series of female fantasy that makes me groan with every panel. 

I'll first talk about Pretty Deadly, which too me should not be in this category and should instead just be featured in a category along the line of "Great Contemporary Graphic Novel". This book is a well rounded and superbly visualized story that does not harp on the fact that the protagonist has a vagina at every waking moment. The story is a well written narrative that deals with higher concepts than just "I have periods". I find it insulting to shove this book into a group of books that are highlighted just because the author is a woman. To put this kind of grouping into effect takes away some of the merit of this book that could hold it's own in a much broader genre than just "by Women".

A book that really revels in the cheapness of "by Women" comics is Rat Queens.... This book is so clearly a money grab at the rising feminist movement of our time that it hurts. Instead of creating respectable women protagonists along the lines of Alita Battle Angel, this book presents the most stereotypical and boring characters since comic book superheroes. The book takes the typical fantasy genre and switches everyone's gender role so that any man mentioned is a complete pussy and every woman is the most bad ass legend of all time. I think people can make whatever they want, I'd never tell the people behind this comic to not make it or anything, but the concept of this book is so vapid, generic, and transparent it was just painful to read. Upon reading the first trade paperback I just asked my comic book shop to take it back, I didn't want my money back or anything I just didn't want this thing in my sight.

I think comparing a book like Battle Angel Alita and Rat Queens is a great way to highlight how I see female characters will actually find a place in popular media. Creating respectable, interesting, and deep characters that people can actually relate to is what I have always loved and see in Battle Angel Alita. These vapid cheap stereotypical characters featured in Rat Queens is just an echo of the old school male hero type that everyone is so sick and tired of now except they changed the gender. I guess girls gotta have their hayday of over the top generic protagonist hero types before their role in entertainment can really evolve.

Comics as Contemporary Literature

This weeks topic as I saw it was reviewing graphic narratives that have achieved success in the market of more traditional literature. Of the books in this category I would describe them as having much more text and in turn having less visual story telling than some other comics. For me, the decision to go in this direction somewhat forfeits the power of a graphic narrative and moves more towards traditional novels. During this week I found myself bouncing between many different titles such as Bone, Asterios Polyp, and Why I Hate Saturn, in an attempt to find something with less text because I'm basically 12 years old when it comes to reading. I remember reading Bone in middle school because It felt like I was reading a book, but it was much easier to understand and much easier to get into for me. Where comics like these lose the direct visual story telling of comics that feature less text I feel they benefit from bridging the gap between comics and novels that is really nice for illiterate people like me who are still working on finishing "Of Mice and Men" from highschool. I definitely enjoy the concept of adding visuals to novels so I would say that I am pro Literary Comics, but in my current stage of life I am more interested in the more direct story telling of comics such as "Deadly Class" and "Rumble" where there is text, but it is exclusive to dialogue and some narrative. I would say as a whole these books are much more immersive for me because of their lack of walls of text. A problem I might have with literary graphic narratives is that some might assume that just because a comic has alot of text that it is some how telling a deeper or more fleshed out story, but I think over the semester I have definitely seen comics that are borderline silent text wise that tell me much deeper and interesting stories than that of the category of Literary Comics.

Overall, I think books like this can be great at getting people who struggle with reading easier access to these stories being told. I would love to see more of these types of books made for younger people, because I feel like as a decently intelligent person I always struggled with falling asleep while reading and being a super slow reader as well, and it would have been great to have more access to the same kind of stories as novels but told in this format.

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.

"Blankets"

by Craig Thompson

"Blankets" is an auto-biographical graphic novel about the life of a fundamental christian as he grows up and battles the conflicting emotions between following the faith and following his dreams. After reading the novel I found it to be an extremely rich and thoughtful account of the authors life. He tells the story of his life from an artistic angle that is easily digested and engaging. A testament to this degree of approachability would be my girlfriend's interest in the novel (a comic novice) , saying that "I never knew that comics were so deep". I feel that this novel is an example of how interesting someone's personal story can be after some self reflection and analysis. The author shows me that a character that is based off of real experience is often much more fleshed out and relatable than a character that you were to just make up. I feel that this is a huge part of art and in my own work I think of every character as being a piece of me, I don't believe there is a way to disconnect yourself from your artwork and if there is than that's a sad way to do art in my honest opinion. I have always felt when the debate over representation in media comes up that the author of any work cannot create things they do not have experience with. I would say that without extensive research and real life experience that it would be very hard for me to write a compelling story about the life of a Korean child seeing that I have never experienced that directly. I feel like this is where alot of stereotypical and archetypical characters come from. Asking for a compelling story about the plights of a black man from Atlanta from a white man from Boston doesn't seem like it would work out well to me just based of the fact that the man from Boston has never experienced the life of the black man from Atlanta. My conclusion from "Blankets" is just to stick to what you know and not in a negative way, but in a way where you celebrate your own experience instead of suppressing it for storylines and characters that marketing people think will resonant with the audience. This novel is straight up fantastic, a must read for anyone interested in story telling.

"Donald Duck in the Old Castle's Secret"

by Carl Barks

The comic book "Donald Duck in the Old Castle's Secret", is a 30 page story about Donald Duck and his families adventures in Scotland as they attempt to find their ancestors lost fortune. Reading this story reminded me of the days of watching cartoons where the characters reveled in a simple conflict that would be resolved in a matter of 15-30 minutes. Unfortunately I think, for whatever reason, my brain is no longer stimulated by these types of stories. As I read through "The Old Castle's Secret" I find myself asking "what's at stake here?", "why do I care about these characters?", and "what is the take away of this story?". I know all too well that Donald isn't going to get killed by the sword wielding specter, I guess to put it simply, I just saw it all coming from a mile away. It's hard for me to explain why I cannot get into an adventure title like this one, yet can be enthralled by the surreal adventures of Little Nemo. It's so hard because I could say that I know the ending of every Little Nemo comic seeing that he always woke up in bed at the end of the adventure, but maybe there was something within the surreal imagery that I could just relate to more than the shenanigans of these ducks. I don't know man, after talking to my friend Andy about Little Nemo we came to the conclusion that the imagery and narratives of Little Nemo are more varied and unrestricted than that of the more realistic Donald Duck series. I don't know man, I just don't know. Let me know if you know because I don't know.

Little Nemo in Sumberland, by Winsor McCay

Little Nemo in Slumberland is so goddamn good. Krazy Kat is great too. I absolutely adore how these pieces shattered my expectation of comic strips or what I've always known as "the funnies". These strips don't just go for the gag, they don't just use some clever word play to give the audience a quick jolt, but rather give the reader an experience. The massive Little Nemo prints are beautifully done, and bring the viewer to another world where anything can happen. Winsor McCay's strip is successful in immersing me as a reader because of it's wonderfully surreal art nouveau inspired images that evokes memories of my own adventures through dreams. I can only imagine reading one of these strips in a pre-Harryhausen world where movie monsters and cgi did not exist. I think the common thread between Krazy Kat and Little Nemo is a sense of depth that I feel strips in the Sunday paper of today lack. The punch lines of these two strips seem more varied and complex than that of the 1, 2, 3, punch of comics today. Krazy Kat was a strip that didn't shy away from having a somber human moment as its "punch line" and Little Nemo seems to have rarely had a gag at all, but instead relied on subtle mysterious stories that people could immerse themselves in. I also personally like how we can see within Krazy Kat and Little Nemo the experimentation and human hand within each work. You can tell that these artists truly loved what they did and really expressed their own feelings and thoughts through their historic work.

The Rooster's Laughter by Max Ernst

"The Rooster's Laughter" is a series of surreal collages made up of images from victorian novels and encyclopedias. The series features a cast of bird headed men displaying strange and often violent behavior. I think that Ernst's work is fascinating, because it explicitly uses icons and imagery to send a message to the viewer. There is something about the idea of taking images from sources like encyclopedias and novels and using their existing meaning in a new way that draws me to this work. While Shaun Tan leveraged the readers personal experience in his work, Ernst seems to thrive off of peoples existing perception of icons and imagery. Ernst understands how people perceive certain images such as the rooster and intentionally gives a new role to these images. Tan seems to bring the reader in by creating familiar situations that are relatable while Ernst uses familiar imagery in a darker light to shock the viewer. In my opinion "The Rooster's Laughter" ultimately shows how the human mind can manipulate imagery and data. In the dream like world that Ernst establishes, all things are susceptible to being twisted to the horrific will of the artist. The effect of Ernst's work reminds me of nightmares in which something that might usually be harmless, like a clown, is given much darker motivations and becomes a much more disturbing experience due to the ordinarily innocent nature of the subject. If Ernst just depicted normal men whipping women and hanging one another then the viewer, having a preexisting understanding of man's violent nature, might not be as shocked as they would to see the normally docile rooster doing such things.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

The Arrival is a silent graphic novel (is every book silent because it contains no audio or is reading in itself some sort of audio? I dunno man) that depicts the journey of an immigrant and his family to a new and strange world in which author, Shaun Tan uses symbols, facial expressions, and brilliant world building to tell the story as opposed to words. In The Arrival we see Tan's ability to manipulate the readers feelings. The story does not lay out on the table "THIS IS AN IMMIGRATION STORY, IT IS ABOUT MY GRANDPA GOING TO ELLIS ISLAND", but instead using surreal imagery and architecture to alienate the reader and make the reader FEEL like an immigrant as opposed to just telling the reader how immigrants might have felt going to a new place. We as the reader do not know the language of this new place and are as confused at times as the character that we are following throughout the novel. This manipulation of the reader gives us a direct connection with the main character because we are going through the story with the character as opposed to watching the character from an omnipotent point of view like you might if you read a book about an immigrant going through Ellis Island when you might already know the history of immigration at Ellis Island. Shaun Tan's immersive story telling is something I would like to implement into gaming. The concept of immersion is huge in video games and with the innovation of virtual reality, the game industry is working towards making more immersive experiences, but I think with more analysis of stories like The Arrival one could learn how to more directly immerse the player into a story.