Unwritten meets Page Master!

The Unwritten was one of the few books that I found to be quite exciting. I love the drawing style and how the title fits so perfectly with story but before reading it you would have no idea what it meant. When i first started reading it I was worried that it would be another one of those books about manga writers or whatever and it would just be about a kids basic life. I was happily proven wrong. I didn’t expect what I got from this book at all. It was exciting and compelling. It was cool how the things that were happening in the book were coming to life and how it was surrounding the main character Tom who his father named the main character in the book after. Reading through these two volumes I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Page Master! An old kids movie where Macaulay Culkin gets sucked into different books. I even looked up the third volume and Tom is supposedly going to be in the story of Moby Dick! Just like in the Page Master! I really liked this book and plan to read the rest of the volumes.

Responding to Lines and Circles

I agree with you on this being a good graphic novel. I actually liked this one the best. It made me laugh on almost every page with its crude and sarcastic humor. I didn’t expect that from this book because the drawing style got in my way at first. I slowly got use to it as I went along. Yeah, I thought that was really cool how he wrote out speeches that were covered up by the other bubble. It really gave the feel of annoyance and tension for the other character, like poor Daisy. I also noticed that when Asterios spoke sometimes there were quotes around his words because it wasn’t the dead brother (narrator) talking. I also noticed the same thing with the way people were drawn. That really bothered me at first, but like you, I noticed how each of the different ways represent different meanings for the characters and their relationships. The ending was my favorite part. If you remember from the beginning where that one guy tells the automotive guy if it was safe to go to work and Asterios makes fun of him for it. Making it sound like it was stupid for that guy to do that and then at the very end where everything was finally right a HUGE meteor is coming down to kill them both. I laughed loud and hard on that one.

 

Exit Wounds BEST OF 2007!

I, myself, wasn’t a very big fan of this comic out of all that we have read this semester. I didn’t care for the drawing style and the story didn’t intreage me much like the others did. When I looked up the comic book online an article popped up saying that this book was rated 5 out of 10 as the best of 2007. I was shocked about that so I opened it up and read a little on it. The short statement that gave the reasoning to why the comic was best of 07 wasn’t that insightful I thought. This is what it said, “A quiet exploration of family in the face of Tel Aviv terrorism told through deceptively simple styling. The most “novelistic” of the books on this list. ” I realized later that there was a page before that gave more insight to the book and better reasoning and got me to see why this was such a great comic. I guess in the end I’m just not one for modernism.

 


Christopher Robin and Tom Taylor

As I was researching what inspired Mike Carey to write this comic book and stumbled upon something quite funny. Mike had claimed in his interview with Nicholas Yanes, from Scifipulse.net, that his most important reference point was the autobiography of Christopher Milne. The man who is famous for Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh. On Wiki, it says that Milne had grown up believing that his father took away his childhood from him. So to get revenge he made profit off it by making stories and then giving it back to his father in a way that he was not able to use it. After I read that and looked back at the book I could see how he used that information in his writing. When I tried to find that interview on Scifipulse.net I could not find anything on it, but I did find some information on the newest release of The Unwritten Vol 23. On the page it talks about how great the story is and what it goes into this time for the newest volume. Another review that starred the newest book 4 out of 5 was on CBR (comic book resources). It is a website that writes reviews on all new release comics and then at the bottom tells you when the next ones come out.

MAUS Cat vs Mouse!

When I first started reading this Graphic Novel I didn’t know what to expect. As I went along I actually started to get into the story and the characters pretty easily. I like the fact that the father’s writing and speech is related to how someone like him would speak. Another thing I was entertained by was the different animals. Mouses were Jewish, Cats were the Nazi’s, Pigs were non Jewish, and the Dogs were American. I really loved the fact that us Americans were the Dogs! It could be an insult but I saw it as we are above the Nazi’s and that they were our enemy as well. This novel does have a very sad and dark story to it, but it cuts off scenes that might seem too gruesome for the readers. Like the scene where the Nazi slammed a little kids head into the wall. The random extra comment strip in the middle of volume one of Maus confused me a bit. I wasn’t sure why that was there and if it was needed. It had a little bit of a different styling and it had humans in it. Overall the Novel was quite enjoyable and had a very interesting way of doing it.

Batman: Everything is exactly the same, but totally different!

A great article I found on Batman gives you a new and intriguing look upon Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. A great beginning quote from the article is from Alan Moore himself, “Miller ‘has taken a character whose every trivial and incidental detail is graven in stone on the hearts and minds of the comic fans that make up his audience and managed to dramatically redefine that character without contradicting one jot of the character’s mythology. … Everything is exactly the same, except for the fact that it’s all totally different.”‘ As they go through the article the last quote is proven through comparisons to other versions of The Batman stories. Like how in the other stories when Batman is retiring they show him proud to have his young robin take his place and his son be the new side kick. But as seen in The Dark Knight Returns, that is not the case and he is actually having trouble with his retirement. Going through the article you get a better grasp on the Dark Knight story and a better look on Millers take on it.