Author: Kacy Gibbons

How to Read Manga- very different version…

I kind of got my hopes up when I read the title for this weeks extra reading, “How to read 1,000,000 Manga Pages.” Of course, I didn’t realize it would be a discourse by Lev Manovich in which he analyzes the color spectrum of images. Or that’s the closest to understanding that I had while listening. Admittedly, his accent on top of the images he used caused my concentration to fade in and out. Maybe some of you were better students when it came to that lecture…

But that title led me to this post.

I am guessing that most people in this class had picked up a graphic novel and had some type of interest before attending. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for me. But sense I had read so much Japanese manga I thought that there would be some type of bridge that linked the two, some way to further my understanding. But I was wrong. It’s not that the art is different, that’s to be expected. Japanese manga functions under different mores. They have different lines to denote certain emotion, their frames are not as linear and their backgrounds have a formulaic set that mangakas use when not applying a place.

This is the traditional reading direction, by the way. I had to train myself to read from right to left again. And I still initially read left to right before realizing something is wrong.

Another difference between manga and graphic novels/comics are the audience. There is a large audience for Manga in America, but most of the readers are female or elementary age boys. I kind of doubt that can be said for graphic novels/comics. The reason being is largely due to manga having more genres to attract a wide array of people.

Going down the list

  • Action/Adventure
  • Romance
  • Sports and Games (Ranging from soccer to Majong)
  • Historical Drama
  • Comedy or gag
  • Science Fiction/Mecha
  • Fantasy/Supernatural
  • Mystery
  • Horror
  • Psychological
  • Tragedy
  • Ecchi (lewd or lascivious manga, involving a lot of panty shots)
  • Business/Commerce
  • Shounen ai (directly translated means “Boy’s love”)
  • Shoujo ai (“Girl’s love)
  • Yuri ( a more “mature” relationship between two women)
  • Yaoi ( a more “mature” relationship between two men. Oddly enough, this is more likely to be read by female fans due to the forbidden relationship aspect. Japanese plots also like to toy with incest for some reason.)
  • Josei (manga geared toward women in their late teens and early twenties)
  • Seinen ( manga geared toward men in their late teens and early twenties)
  • Shounen (geared toward elementary boys)
  • Shoujo (geared toward younger girls)
  • Doujinshi (self published or amateur manga- mainly sold at places like comicon)

Manga is something that you can walk onto a subway and see a business man and a high school girl reading. Of course with vastly different plots.

Anywho, to get slightly back onto the topic of this week. Reading online comics is a much more mainstream notion than most would think. That’s how I got addicted to manga. Because it was easily accessible, easily updated and free. This seems like it would be a detriment to the author, but I think it runs along the lines of downloading music. People still want to own a copy or have something tangible. Also, the manga that is translated onto an online format is normally sold in weekly magazines and then larger volumes following an arc. People are still definitely getting paid. Especially, if it turns into an anime, movie or drama.

I am sorry if this was all over the place, but what I am basically saying is that comics or manga being online just leads to a larger audience.

Dissonance

I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of cognitive dissonance.

Direct from Wikipedia:

Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions.[2] Dissonance is also reduced by justifying, blaming, and denying. It is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology.

What I get from this theory is that people have an idea of what they are. Mostly we believe that we are good people. But what happens when we are placed in a situation that causes us to come face to face with the cracks in our humanity? On top of Waltz with Bashir being a pretty clear case of PTSD, I also think it deals with this notion of dissonance.

In this graphic novel we are led through Ari Folman’s quest to recover his memories of the 1982 Lebanon War. As reader’s we are aware that soldiers are asked to do and witness some pretty traumatizing events. But what was it about the massacre that led him to completely wipe his memories of what occurred? Did he corner a group of women and children and then was asked to kill them? Maybe some of us were slightly confused by the passive role he played in the massacre, as in how could just lighting a few flares create enough guilt to erase a chunk of memory?

In reality, the leap from doing something like lighting the way and actually being a part of murder is not that hard to make. I can say from personal experience that doing nothing is almost as culpable as actually taking a part. And both acts will change or haunt a person.

A Duality that Fits

Being complete is such a weird notion. It has eleven different definitions, some referring to grammar and others mathematics. But when someone says it in reference to themselves, it’s a little harder to quantify. Does it mean they want to feel satisfied? Content? Happy? Or is it as simple as just feeling whole? As if they really lack nothing.

I just found it interesting how this story played with different themes of being complete. Like being born a pair, but not really. Before Asterios even realized that he was born a twin, he recognized a lack. Always looking over his shoulder and expecting…just something to be there. The knowledge that he was supposed to have an identical brother, rather than creating a sense of closure, only made an opening. Thoughts like, “Would he have been just like me? Better than me, worse than me” crowded in and he could never feel truly satisfied with anything he did.

I find it interesting that that writer introduced the Aristophanes treatise in Plato’s “Symposium”, although Mazzucchelli kind of left out that it is a speech about romantic love. Basically, Aristophanes put forth the idea that there is a special type of love that connects people, a soul mate. He goes on to say that there were once three genders: male, female and a combination of the two.  That these sexes in truth represented one’s soul and when the third gender split in half it created a mirror image of each. He thought that love was the search for the other half of one’s soul. Aristophanes also believed that this search for love showed a certain “lack”, as if being separated meant one was fated to die incomplete. Although, Mazzucchelli related through drawings of man’s drive to complete himself <Asterios in different modes of copulation> it can’t only be implied that his completion would be felt through a female. Maybe he was a fourth gender, his twin and the lives that would have played out had he been born alive.

This lack of completion follows through on a romantic level as well, with his wife Hana. The writer even has a blatant reason for why they were attracted to each other and why it didn’t work. At one point he even positions them in the extremely recognizable symbol of yin and yang. This Chinese philosophy explains how polar or seemingly opposite forces are interconnected but also interdependent. Asterios even comments about how well they fit together, how their lives just folded together so neatly.  But this “fit” couldn’t override the fact that the could barely communicate on the same level.

When the marriage breaks up Asterios is left floundering again, completely lost and still searching.

Duality and completion just kept battling each other right to the end.

The Disconnect of Intellectualism

I am assuming that everyone has read a work of scholarly criticism. Maybe some of you have even written a work of scholarly criticism <kudos if that’s the case>. But what happens when you take the tropes of that type of writing and apply it to yourself or how you view others? The elevated language, the convoluted symbolism and the ever constant references to different works can leave a feeling of numbness. At least, that’s what I experienced while reading Bechdel’s graphic novel.

When I refer to numbness I am not trying to insult the text by saying I was bored. But how can one truly connect with a text when the author tries its best to create the distance?

It was like she was recreating her father’s fortress of solitude <aka-his library> in pictures and narrative. He tried to make a room solely devoted to art and expression, the higher reaches of culture. But most of the books in there were never experienced, left to collect dust. The appearance without substance.

Why write an extremely personal and graphic <no pun intended> account of your life and devalue the best part? It was like she couldn’t explain herself or the relationship she had with her father without dissembling or making a connection with literature. And I find it slightly ironic that she BSed her way through her oral exam of Ulysses, even stating that she didn’t understand why someone would look for the underlying symbolism and just read the damn thing, and then uses Ulysses as a way to represent herself and her father.

At that point I just wanted to exclaim,” Just let me read the damn thing without adding anymore metaphors or symbolism!” Or at least don’t point it out to me and trust that I can see the parallels myself.

Super-Man the symbol of forboding

There were many reoccurring themes throughout Jimmy Corrigan, but the image that really seemed to haunt the pages was Super-Man.

We see his first incarnation while Jimmy is a small boy eager to to meet a flawless and skilled male role model. Of course, this ideal goes to shambles when the man behind the mask picks up his mother for a one night stand. In Jimmy’s innocence he doesn’t recognize the morning after awkwardness for what it was. Or how relating  the message of, “he had a read good time” could possibly affect his mother.

The next time Jimmy encounters a real life Super-Man it’s as he watches someone plummet to their death. This keeps unsettling him as he sees reminders in newspapers and such. This perturbation follows him into his fantasies. To balance the weirdness he feels upon meeting his father again he tries to spin a tale in which this meeting acts as fate. In his fantasy he is tucking in his son at bedtime, relating how his visit to his father eventually led to meeting the mother of the child. Their intimate moment is fractured by the appearance of a small version of super-man at the windowsill. This version turns into a monstrous giant that lifts up and destroys the house along with Jimmy’s “son”.

The representation of Super-man at this time begins to act as a portent of horrible things to come. Such as when Jimmy is hit by a truck and instead of seeing the driver check him over, he sees Super-man. Or when Jimmy makes a secret phone call to his mother while at a diner. A kid is playing with a close approximation of Super-man while Jimmy’s father discovers the phone call. Super-man and his likeness becomes a signal to the viewer.

So when we see Jimmy wearing his father’s Super-Man sweatshirt we are basically told two things.

1) his father is probably not going to make it out of the hospital

2) his father is also alligned with the original Super-man we first saw. The man who didn’t stick around.

Back in Chicago we see the Super-man sweatshirt collapsed forgotten in the corner of his room. His father has once again abandoned him, just in a more permanent fashion.

And the last Super-man we see is just before the page that hold, “The End”. A rather whimsical image of Super-man cradling a young Jimmy in his arms as he flies away. A representation of Jimmy’s first hopes and dreams? It’s a bit mysterious considering it is the last thing the reader sees.

Lost in Translation

I’ll admit it. I am not quite sure what Baker’s intentions were while creating this graphic novel. At least, I feel as if he sent some mixed messages.

We know from his preface that the artist felt a certain type of fascination with Nat Turner. And if makes sense to draw/write on a topic that interests one. But I feel as if he went a little far in his preface when he mentions, ” The Nat Turner story has lots of action and suspense, also a hero with superhuman abilities. I often choose to write books on subjects I wish to know more about. I wanted to know how a person nobody wanted to talk about could be arguably one of the most important men in American history” (pg. 6).

A hero with superhuman abilities? Exactly how is murder heroic and superhuman? How is using religion to support one’s own view unusual? Even his megalomania was commonplace.

One of the most important men in American history? Well I assume murdering a bunch of people will grant you a footnote in some history book somewhere.

I guess I just don’t understand the juxtaposition of the preface in relation to the story. It causes a lot of conflict.

Without the preface I would have viewed this story as a “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” story. Basically, treating men as beasts will probably make them so.

To be fair to Baker, he related a rather realistic background for the story and didn’t try to portray Nat Turner in a heroic manner. In fact, using Turner’s own clinical and chilling recounting completely obliterated any thoughts of a knight on a charger. But Baker did give him some manner of nobility. Especially during the depiction of the lynching scene. The crowd completely surrounding him with expectant faces as he stoically views the brilliant sky. The unnerved faces as they watch the stillness of his body as he exhales his last breath.

Maybe I am having such a difficult time with this text because I don’t share the same fascination that Baker does…

PTSD transformed

When reading the second volume of Maus, my mind kept revisiting the PTSD essay we read last week. I was reminded of how there are two different reactions to trauma. The first, and healthier of the two, is going through the trauma but being able to compartmentalize it. The memories naturally distant themselves and morph. The second reaction is when one can’t get over the trauma. Every memory is as clear as if it had just happened.  It effects your daily life, your body is in a constant state of arousal, close to panic. Even though it wasn’t clearly said, I feel as if Anja and Vladek represent these two types.

Vladek wasn’t the restful type. I believe that there was only one moment in the entire story where he was sitting without fidgeting or contemplating what to do next, the moment while they were sitting outside. Mostly the reader’s saw him exercising, walking, counting pills, going over bills and just fretting. This restlessness I attribute to his brand of survivalism.  Part of his PTSD was a constant readiness.  Maybe discussing the events of the holocaust caused some of the restlessness we saw, but the almost distant tone with which he used negates that. If it wasn’t sometimes boastful I feel as if he could have been telling a tale that he’d heard.

His hustling tendencies, admittedly amusing, also seemed like a form of his PTSD. He hoarded his money and wouldn’t spend a dime if a nickel would do. The moment where he goes to the grocery store to return a box of already opened cereal, although a wee bit funny, was also slightly saddening. He also had no shame playing the pity card by using his holocaust survivor status to get the manager to acquiesce.

Everyone in the story claims that Vladek’s penny pinching is not a result of the holocaust, but how he has always been. And yet there is evidence in the previous story that he wasn’t always like that. Such as when his wife had postpartum depression and he took her on a 3 month “honeymoon” to a popular resort for her to get help. This doesn’t appear to be the same guy who wouldn’t pay to get his roof fixed by a professional.

Maybe his PTSD wasn’t as severe as his wife’s…but it definitely shaped him.

No Rules to Break

an·ti·he·ro

–noun, plural -roes.

a protagonist who lacks the attributes that make a heroic figure, as nobility of mind and spirit, a life or attitude marked by action or purpose, and the like.

Would you consider it irony that a super-hero is also an antihero?

The reader is brought into the world of Watchmen by an unreliable narrator, Rorschach. His inner voice filled with criticisms, misgivings and blatant paranoia. From the cops we are told that his body count is impressive and somewhat indiscriminant. This is now a world where vigilantism, or being a masked superhero, is outlawed. There is no place for him in this new world order but retiring was never an option for him.

What about him do we find gripping? Why does a part of us still believe his mental meanderings?

With the Comedian’s death we watch him systematically follow leads that, for the most part, hold loose logic. He immediately leaps to the conclusion that the Comedian’s death is just the beginning of an all out slaughter on heroes. Even though there is no direct evidence to correlate his hypothesis, added to the fact that we know the Comedian had plenty of enemies, we still think there is truth in what he says.

I just find it mystifying that I hold some type of faith in this unreliable character. Am I somewhat programmed to believe in him just because he allied himself on the side of “right”? Unlike Batman, whose moral code is sparse but unbendable, Rorschach only sees himself as judge and executioner. What are a few broken bones if he can get some answers? If he couldn’t get any answers, well, then it’s just a few broken bones.

Maybe it’s his chaotic lawlessness that attracts me, a character that can’t be typified as a criminal or a hero. Someone directly outside the lines of comfortable labeling. The perfect antihero.