I was watching an old Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode, and…well, if Jimmy Corrigan isn’t consciously referencing this, I’m sure Ware at least saw it at some point. It’s about two brothers who live on a peach farm and have an old pick-up truck. One goes out to avenge their father’s death, while the other, dimwitted one mostly just bites his thumb and wears overalls. It’s a good episode, anyway: here’s the link.

http://www.nbc.com/classic-tv/the-alfred-hitchcock-hour/video/episodes/#vid=917681

This is a pretty long article, but I thought it was great how many things it mentions that we’ve read. She also brings up several other great graphic novels that I’ve read outside of class.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v052/52.4chute01.html

This is Hillary Chute’s intro to the Modern Fiction Studies, the first issue of any scholarly literary journal, I believe, to focus entirely on “graphic narratives.” She goes through the basic intro and history, including extensive borrowing from Understanding Comics, and then goes on to mention some narratives, and studies of narratives, of note. I liked the idea that the form of comics challenges a binary classification, since words and images work together with neither taking precedence. Later, she talks about censorship of both photos and drawings, including the Danish Mohammad cartoon that raised so much controversy, to emphasize the power of images.

I thought this might be a good source for ideas or quotes if anyone needs some for their paper. Plus, it’s a good review of a lot of the stuff we’ve discussed.

I’m not sure if all of these are legitimate, but i’m a big fan of good quotations and she seems to have a few in here.  She talks about the difficulty of grey hair in black and white, something i hadn’t really even thought about, and how she feels about both the writing and the drawing aspects of putting together her works.

http://www.icelebz.com/quotes/alison_bechdel/

Project Muse is great, its where i go for articles when Mason fucks up and doesn’t have them on hand.  This article talks about Fun Home and the way its framed by Joyce and also the extent to which Bechdel acknowledges this influence.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_modern_literature/summary/v032/32.4.freedman.html

And, since this is my last blog post, here are a few more links that I think some may find pretty interesting.

http://www.youcantkilltherooster.com/stories.php?story=10&disp=f

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/deb6d878ce/the-avett-brothers-slight-figure-of-speech?utm_medium=columbia-email&utm_source=theavettbrothers&utm_campaign=columbia-emailtheavettbrothers20091123

and because i’m a Gaiman nerd

http://io9.com/5086663/5-ways-that-sandman-changed-the-world

aaaand if batman and spiderman were lazy or retarded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G18jhC3b53A

So I went and did a search on the tragicomic and I got 2 distinct results.  Epic stories like the Odyssey or Shakespeare works or a music artist.

Musical artist link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOwDgOqS4_I

Tragicomedy link on wikipedia since I think the dictionary.com has been found already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragicomedy

Really makes you think about what other “classics” qualify as tragicomic

http://www.progressive.org/radio_bechdel06

Here is a pretty interesting interview with Bechdel on progressive radio. she gives an overview of her book in this interview, touching on the social and political climate of her time. i found this article pretty interesting. out of the three personal memoirs, in two of them the protagonists are seeing therapists. bechdel mentions briefly how she is seeing a therapist now. both spiegelman’s and bechdel’s family experiences have been more than traumatizing, each dealing with tragic deaths in their families. These relationships are pretty fascinating, which is why i think the memoirs make for good reads. anyhow, the interview is pretty cool and covers some good topics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cumLU3UpcGY&feature=player_embedded

Apparently  Bechdel wasn’t exaggerating her father’s usage of jean cut offs. They were indeed that short.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-best-comics-of-the-00s,35713/

as the link suggests, fun home is on this list. Also thought this was a cool reference for finding contemporary comics in future reading endeavors.

http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/

bechdel’s webpage ^

if anyone is interested in what else she is involved in, etc.

When I first saw Fun Home on the syllabus, I mistook it for another novel revolving around a daughter and father called Daddy’s Girl.  Daddy’s Girl  is an incredibly disturbing, semi-auto-biographical, account of incest. It originally ran as a strip in New York Press in the 90’s, and was published in 1995. It won the Ignatz Award, fell out of print, but is now available in hard back form as of 2008, a testament to the power of the story.  The author’s family unfortunately completely denies any abuse took place, but Dreschler’s sister who witnessed most of the abuse (although was not abused herself) acts as a witness to the veracity of the author’s story. Her parents, and the rest of her family except for her one sister, stopped speaking to her after the strip was published. The strips feature the protagonist “Lily” being sexually abused on a nightly basis by her father while her sister pretends to sleep. Lily’s father makes her feel guilty about the abuse (as many abusers do, tragically layering guilt onto the pain of the abuse itself) and she feels that she is the “seducer” and tries to protect her mother from the truth, although it’s suggested throughout the novel that her mother may be aware of it.  The second part of the novel features a girl named “Franny” who is raped by a drug dealer in the woods, and then becomes consumed with guilt and shame for placing herself in the situation that resulted in the attack. Both protagonists are vulnerable girls (Franny is the lonely, new girl in town, desperate to make friends) suffering at the hands of older, male abusers. There are some parallels between Fun Home and Daddy’s Girl in the exploration of the relationship between father’s and daughters, how painful the truth can be, the denial of dysfunction and the desperation to appear normal to the outside world.

Just to be clear, this book is very graphic and very disturbing.  I felt nauseated reading it, and you can’t easily shake the dirty feeling away after the book ends.

http://talkingwithtim.com/wordpress/2008/04/28/debbie-drechsler-on-daddys-girl/   Interview with author from 2008 when the book was re-printed.

Another better interview, from Vice from 1996 when the strips first came out  http://www.viceland.com/blogs/en/2006/05/22/ten-years-ago-in-vice-daddys-little-slut/#more-4407

The following is a link from a youtube video where Alison discusses her process…its actually different from anything we’ve heard from an author yet…I always find it interesting to see how these authors undertake doing what they do. This was especially enlightening considering how intricate some of the artwork is….enjoy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cumLU3UpcGY

http://www.marshallnews.com/story/1193923.html

Found this little gem after a quick search.  Craig Thompson was mentioned in the Freedman article; sounds like we may want to check that out once we’re done with papers and such.  The body of the story caught my attention because the jist of both side’s arguments is “doing what’s best for the kids” or thereabouts.  It seems people still can’t get over the fact that adults read comic books.  There was really no reason for the books to be in the kid’s section in the first place.  There needs to be some kind of Reading Corps, classifying and placing books by actually reading and fairly analyzing them, because no one with the job of shelving these things seems willing to crack open the pages.  Any thoughts from you guys?

On the back of the book “Fun Home” I noticed a website. I went to check out the comics this author has drawn and I was surprised at how different the tone of the comics are from the book. If you have the time I would suggest giving at least a couple of the strips a read, it might add a new perspective on the rest of “Fun Home.”

http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/strip-archive-by-number

As many famous Japanese mangas, Uzumaki was also made into film.

There are some clips from this movie on youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd8a6BJT2cc&feature=related

Ny times calls this movie very dissapointing portray of the manga. They claim that film has failed to captivate the most essential parts of the comic.

NYtime Review on the movie :

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9903EFDB1731F932A35756C0A9649C8B63

It is interesting to see the transition of the manga into movie and how they often fail to capture the most essential parts of the manga.

I found a small interview with Junji Ito on youtube and he talks about the manga and the movie Uzumaki a bit as well as a  little bit about his other horror manga.

Also to add to Leon’s link about the Uzumaki movie, here’s a link to a review for the movie. Beware: there are images from the movie and some are a little graphic.

Junji Ito interview

Uzumaki

As for Wilfred Santiago, I found his official site if anyone is interested. You do have to click around a little as when you first get to the site it’s blank.  Although there doesn’t seem to be much on the site.

Wilfred Santiago