Comics through the Online Medium

I enjoyed reading the comics (graphic novels?) online this week. At first, as reflected on Twitter, I thought the medium would be a hindrance. Some Twitterers (Tweeters?) seemed to enjoy the zoom in capabilities of reading the comics online. Theoretically, this would give us more time to get into the nitty-gritty of each panel, taking time to savor, but for whatever reason, I felt less compelled to zoom in, even when all it did was take a click. I enjoyed the ability to, and I think I did a few times, but I didn’t feel as compelled to read “close” like I did when I had the graphic novel in front of me wherever I happened to be reading it.

I found some elements to be pretty interesting about this week’s readings and movie. For Shooting War, I liked the ability of the comic to be so “in your face” and relevant for today. The guy was a blogger, vlogger, multi-media journalist, and that made it seem all the more realistic or at least all the more present, even when the comic was straying from the current reality (President McCain, for example). Maybe I just like that the comic is that relevant, an element that will probably be a moot point soon enough. I think I liked that initial reaction more than I liked the comic itself. I was taken back by several of the panels (in a good way), but overall, I’ve just never been into political…anything so it’s not Shooting War’s fault necessarily that it couldn’t completely keep my interest.

I did enjoy Bayou, however. The colors and the drawings themselves reminded me of a children’s book, even when the content was disturbing. The colors were washed out enough that we knew we were in a different time without them saying anything, but they weren’t sepia enough to be distracting, which I thought was well-done.

Stylistically, both of the comics had something to offer the reader, and I took away something from each. With Bayou, I was more taken with the story, and with Shooting War, I found myself more impressed with the form (running camera feed, etc) and the notion of the comic than I was with the actual product.

~Kelley

Ending Exit Wounds

Reading Rutu Mordan’s Exit Wounds leaves me thinking “What’s the point?” I don’t mean this question to be in the typical sense, about questioning whether or not the graphic novel has a point, but rather, I think it is interesting to think about what Modan sees as being the “main storyline” of the work. If one was reading this graphic novel as a plot for Koby to find his father and Numi to find her once lover, who is also Koby’s father, then the book would be disappointing. Yes, Koby does “find” his father by finding his father’s new home and new wife, but he doesn’t meet Gabriel, nor do we get to see him by the end of the book. In that sense, the book would lack closure, perhaps, but I can’t make myself see the search for Gabriel as the point of the book. Rather, I see the search for Gabriel as a means to tell the story.

The point could be a practice in looking at Koby and Numi as they come together through their struggles about their own flaws and supposed shortcomings (Koby and his father issues and Numi and her physical hang-ups). It could be showing how the characters push aside inadequacies in order to overcome their loss (of Gabriel through his abandonment of both characters in different ways). I think to this point, Lindsay makes a lot of good point about how the book is painted by victimization.

I think what really led me to the question of what was Modan’s point was the fact that by the end of the book, I didn’t feel like the end was really the end. The book didn’t feel resolved, and I don’t believe that was simply because I didn’t get to see Gabriel by the end. Like Koby in the last panel, I’m left free-floating, not necessarily in plot but in feeling. Okay, they didn’t find Gabriel, but Koby and Numi found each other; I just didn’t and don’t think that the story could be left literally hanging without me feeling like the ending was a little abrupt. However, I do feel like that’s pretty unfair of me to ask for more at the same time because I’m not sure what else I would really want to see. I think it’s better we didn’t see Gabriel; I’m okay with Koby being with Numi, I think; but by the end of the graphic novel, I’m left suspended (which undoubtedly reminds me of the end of Fun Home, visually and psychologically but the latter in a different way).

I suppose this is the part of my post where I remark that the “left in the air” or perpetual juggling without falling was Modan’s point in ending this graphic novel the way that she did, and maybe, to that end, a lot of others found that ending to be effective, but for whatever reason (one that’s increasingly elusive to find), I can’t make myself be completely satisfied with the ending of Exit Wounds, even if I can see Modan’s point in leaving us always coming down to earth with Koby. Maybe I’m just over the “in media res” abrupt endings…

~Kelley

IMDH: Gritty Realism

I fairly positive there is a lot to take away from Wilfred Santiago’s graphic novel, In My Darkest Hour, but after reading and looking through it several times, I am not sure that I got the half of it (which does make me more eager to hear more about it in class—especially other people’s reactions to it). I’ve only tweeted a couple times about this book because I seem to be left with more questions than answers about what I have read. I was more visually assaulted with this graphic novel than any other one we’ve read so far this semester, as gruesome realism does seem to be appropriately attached this work as well.

I think I kept coming away from panels of this book thinking they were more grotesque than just gruesome. In fact, in some (okay more than some) cases, I could leave the panel almost positive that I have no idea what Santiago drew there. I felt chaotic reading it, like at times not knowing up from down or what to study and what to move on from quickly. The calming colors of Asterios Polyp are far….far……far gone. (Although I do think that it is funny that in the cases of IMDH and AP, I can say the colors are both “washed out,” even if they are in completely different ways.)

Now, with the dishwater yellows, BLACKS (capitalized because of the color’s domination), and antique-y washed out color tones, I feel that visually the images are unstable. The fact that we have drawings, real pictures, and montages of all kinds thrown in for good measure emphasizes that fact and disallows the reader from stabilizing the narrative concretely. Obviously, it would seem, the mental issues that arise in the graphic novel attack the reader visually as they try to make sense of the world they are reading about, just as Omar tries to make sense of the world he is living in. Are things at times just hard to read because mentally they are hard to deal with?

What echoes the whole grotesque or gruesome realism is that I can’t remember anything in this graphic novel being drawn or done in a flattering light. The world is, well…ugly, and in IMDH, it shows. When I got to the part of Bakhtin’s article on “Grotesque Realism” that says “The body copulates, defecates, overeats, and men’s speech is flooded with genitals, bellies, defecations, urine, disease, noses, mouths, and dismembered parts. Even when the flood is contained by norms of speech, there is still an eruption of these images into literature, especially if the literature is gay or abusive in manner,” I felt it to be extremely fitting with IMDH (319). We have copulation and overeating, as sex and being overweight are dominate image themes, and I think this graphic novel seems to be flooded with it as Bakhtin suggests some literature can be. While I may not be able to conclusively talk about everything within IMDH, I can assuredly say that in my opinion, the work, in color and in theme, is gritty realism, if nothing else.

Color and Not

When I figuratively walk away from Asterios Polyp and ask myself what is the first thing I remember, I answer color, and lack thereof. My first tweets about this graphic novel were along the lines of “Does anyone else feel calm reading this work? Maybe it’s something about the colors…” Looking back at the book, I see so much white space, and what is colored is colored in faded yellows, purples, and washed out blues. It’s like I was looking at the story through a muted lens, and for whatever reason, this made me feel calmer about the work, even when meteors were crashing down in the pages.

Before I looked back at the work, I would have said that the all of the book was colored in the manner of muted hues. I would have said that every page was done in a similar palette to the next, nothing too jarring, nothing too saturated. But when I actually do look back at the pages, I find that that assessment is wrong. There are several portions of the book where the pages are drenched in color. Pages into the graphic novel, we have wall to wall purple as Asterios and others run down the stairs and as yellow fire trucks fight back yellow flames. No, there’s not the eye-gouging red and dripping blue, but color dominates the page in a way that I didn’t immediately call to mind.

The next saturated segment tells us Hana’s story. The pages are soaked in red, with the exceptions of the page literally being folded back to show us Asterios and Hana talking in the present, against the background of her past. I like Lindsay’s assessment of Hana and Asterios as complimentary colors, red and blue respectively, and I do believe that works in regards to these pages as well.

Hana’s often colored with red. From glimpses into her life story (as shown mostly by the red pages), we know that Hana is quiet, if not shy, and prone to avoid the spotlight either by it literally not being shined on her by her family or by choice as we see her avoid speaking engagements. As her “flower” name implies, Hana still has a thirst for life and in enjoyment for it, while Asterios is shown as seeing the world in dichotomies.

At first I thought where Hana can see the world saturated with color (like red), Asterios would have more binary color choices, which makes me first literally think of black and white. But, as the graphic novel (and the beginning of my post) shows you, the graphic novel operates in muted colors, seemingly negating my neatly packaged color metaphor. However, I still think it could apply because instead of trying to look for the world through Asterios as being just black and white, I see it rather as being pages of white and color, the absence of color and then the presence. Much of the graphic novel operates in colors portioned against consuming white space.

An example of this can be seen early on, following the “Here’s your coffee, Professor” panels. Hana is shown at the bottom of this page awash in red shadow. She’s etched onto the background, her portion of the panel blending into the page with no clear ending between her and the white of the page. Contrasting her is Asterios, shown in hard lines of blue. His portion of the panel is clearly defined; not blending into the page, although Hana’s red encroaches on his neat lines. While Hana is saturated with red, Asterios is still a practice in binaries, defined by the areas where his harsh blue lines take up space and the white areas where the lines do not.

~Kelley

Bechdel as Curator

I found a lot of things to be interesting about Fun Home, even when I couldn’t exactly decide if I even liked the work as a whole. Bechdel does have the knack to align the complex narrative of her father parallel to her own life that she’s still discovering; so I have to recognize the talent involved with that. I thought it was interesting that for so much of the beginning of the book, I had resigned the story by making Bechdel a practice in opposites of her father. He liked ornate design; she opted for streamlined. He loved the feminine mystique; she studied masculinity religiously. He was a literature nut, and she resisted, paranoid enough about her own words to stop her from wanting to look out for others. But, as the tale goes on, or rather not as the tale goes on, but as the graphic novel moves forward, Bechdel and her father’s diverging lines of personality come back together, again paralleling in a way that apparently she only found after his death and after beginning to embark on producing this work.

Really, I think what attracted me to the work, while also being what pushed me away from it, was museum effect that Bechdel points out so early on in the work. Her father kept the house like a museum. The children and his wife were forced with the project of helping him with the upkeep of his masterpiece, becoming extensions of his own body (13), for practical reasons. The family operated as a colony of artists, as she shares, where each separated themselves in order to enjoy their own solitary craft. The house was a museum; the family was its keepers; and it seemed like Bechdel’s parents were on display for her to study, but not to get all that close to, until, that is, when she grew up and into herself.

This attracted me because there was so much so reflection on Bechdel’s part as she tried to make sense of the home and family dynamic that she grew up in. She was the tour guide for our time in the Fun Home, and a studying tour guide for the book or place that was her father. I saw Bechdel as a curator, really, throughout the tale, and that’s why I never felt closeness to her family, but I suppose that just puts us more in her own position with them.

The appeal of her work is that Bechdel does put so much time into orchestrating the tour of her own tale as it is in concert with her finding out more about her father. She uses a lot of devices to guide us through the narrative, most poignantly in her use of the literary texts she uses to frame her life and her father’s stories and passions.

I think ultimately what kept me from saying at the end of this book that I liked it was the fact that I felt unresolved when it came to her relationship with her father, but I knew that would happen because of his death which guides so much of the memoir. When she actually does have the “what we have in common” talk on 220 and 221, I wanted to feel like they had come together definitively, but like she says at the end of that conversation, “and all too soon we were at the theater,” leaving me slightly frustrated but somewhat resigned (221).  I know by the end she did come together with him technically, leaving us with a picture of them as being close, playing together on the piano, but I guess Bechdel succeeded in making the memoir like life, real, even if it left me wanting more.

~Kelley

Nat Turner: Panel Pics and Color Choices

When I heard that Nat Turner wouldn’t have any text, or, rather, would have very limited text, part of me was worried. I must still admit that it was only a small part of me that worried, because I learned from Dark Knight alone that graphic novel pictures can pack a heck of a punch. I found myself thinking how quick of a read Nat Turner would be, but that wasn’t the case. I spent minutes on every panel dissecting it, trying to distinguish the background shading from the skin, the action indicators from the weapons, and sometimes, it took me a while simply to register what I was looking at. There was so much that was grotesque, disturbing, and/or weighted, that at times I didn’t know where to look or what I was supposed to be seeing until I looked again…and again. (For example page 198 top panel. I can see clearly now that it is a headless body on a table and that the actual head is being held by the man on the right, but when I first quickly looked at it, I couldn’t tell for seconds what any of it was.)

I definitely was forced often to slow down and “read” the pictures. I had to stop and stare to digest what was going on before I could move to the next page or the next detail. And then, what I did see, I am haunted by. How naïve was I to find Maus disturbing? (Half joking here…) Maus still has its moments, but there is much more gruesomeness being enacted for you on the pages here that the violence is shown in the forefront, even when we only see bubbles of the aftermath.

The preface of Nat Turner is very appropriately written, as I was glad to have read it once I finished the novel. Baker calls his story the “perfect subject for a comic book,” and I think, to some extent that that is true (6). The sentence long explanations that the history books give on Nat Turner do not drive home what happened. The history we are taught lets us glaze over the gritty details, but also don’t let us forget that something of significance did happen at the same time. By using such a visual medium to show this story, it is harder for the reader to leave with the same understanding of the Nat Turner rebellion. Even when it is hard to understand what you are seeing in the panels, you are still left with a sentiment for what it going on within them.

This is a story that reminded me of a class discussion. I couldn’t handle these same panels in color. It’s a lot to take in with just the shades of brown, black, and gray. If in these muted tones it still overrides the senses, I can’t imagine what it would be like all in color. In fact, I think it would have made it too “cartoony” even if the cartoon would be completely disturbing. As it stands, it almost shows as an old time photo in its sepia tones. To be in color like it is on the cover would lend itself to a strictly over the top horror genre that I think would be too distracting. Shading and blending make this book have depth; line confusion and make the pictures have more weight. To add color would be to get rid of the confusion for where lines stop and would make the picture clearer, which I think would come to the detriment of art itself.

~Kelley

The Story We Know and the Mice We Don’t

Disturbance comes not from the mice, but from us mentally righting the narrative from mice back to men. Brown speaks of this saying, “When you read Maus, you don’t identify the characters as animals. You decipher human beings, and then the metaphor takes hold. You are disrupted, upset. That is the effect Speigelman hoped for…” (108). While I agree with most of this, I have the opposite reaction to the text than to think of the mice as people initially. I read the story, visually seeing that it is about mice, and then I right the depictions of mice as being people, and the story takes a spin constantly. Yes, I do decipher human beings, but only after I have told myself they are mice first.

I am disturbed constantly because I have to rectify the story from the animals being shown to the people being tortured. The dehumanizing effect of the animals humanizes the terror of the events when you right what Speigelman has purposefully made wrong. Right after Brown’s statement, Speigelman is quoted saying that righting the work in your head is a “problem you’re always left with.” That is where the horror lies. Page after page, panel after panel, I am stuck with the mantra “These aren’t mice; these are people; and this story is supposed to be real.”

There seems to be two levels of distance at play with Maus, one that deals with the visual and one through the storytelling itself. Neither of these levels detracts from the story, more appropriately, both add to the experience of Maus. Speigelman forces us to engage with the story by subverting our expectations of the Holocaust tale by using animals for people. The imagery is pulling us into a conversation with the event more fully because we are pushed away from the tale when we think that it is dealing with animals and then immediately pulled further into the tale when we realize the text is dealing with human beings.

The separation only occurs to pull us closer to the tale, as Speigelman suggests his purpose is. He wanted the animals to be a problem we would have to wrestle with. Though, I will admit, and echo what has been talked about in the Twitter conversation, at times, his characterization of the people as animals can be distracting. I would not say it is overly distracting, however, but it might make some too far removed from the story to successfully come back to the realization Speigelman intended.

The other level of distance comes from the storytelling itself. When we are engaged in the story of Vladek, we feel immediacy in the story. Speigelman didn’t have to have to specific backgrounds to make us engaged. We, through the tale, could, to some extent feel like we are there, but then we are reminded often that the story is a tale within a tale, automatically providing a distance between us and the actual Holocaust story. We are at all times given a present tale between Vladek the survivor and Art his cartoonist son as the story is being told, but whenever we get into the Holocaust narrative from Vladek’s past, we are constantly reminded that we are not there, we are being told about it from a narrative we must deal with trusting.

~Kelley

Gaiman’s Script and Dr. Destiny Balloons

I thought the most rewarding part of reading these two volumes of Sandman was the fact that we got a script of Gaiman’s at the end of volume 3, for “Calliope” which is actually the particular story that I found the most intriguing of that volume. After reading the Comic Book Creators chapter for this week’s reading, I found myself even more interested in the process of collaboration that occurs between the writer and the artist(s). In Gaiman’s example, I found it refreshing that even though he had a full, formal-ish, script for the comic, there was still obviously room for the artistic input of Kelley Jones.

The structure of Gaiman’s script is fairly formal, in my opinion. He gives a panel by panel summary of what he expects to happen. When I had read up on collaborations, I thought the idea of a full script would be stifling for the artist, but as Gaiman’s script shows, his tone and execution of the script can be informal, while his expectations for the panel can still be fairly detailed. I think that has to be one of the most effective ways for a comic marriage to work between the creator and the illustrator, when these two are separate entities.

I also found the sequence of collaboration to be a telling element about how the story can come together. When you read the script, the explanation of the panels reads in the present tense, followed by the actual dialogue of the comic. Then, in red we see Gaiman’s notes on how Kelley took the script and penciled it. Yet, seemingly before the images are actually drawn, we also have Kelley’s notes on how the images should be handled when they actually are drawn. My understanding then of how the script becomes the comic would be that Gaiman writes the script, gives it to Kelley who writes notes about how the images should be accomplished, and then we have Gaiman’s notes about the process and how it is carried out by Kelley and then Malcolm who inked the artwork in. An example of this can be found on page ten of the script where we have the text of the script and Gaiman’s comments on the comic process for how Calliope is drawn when we are first introduced to her.

All in all, I found the script to be illuminating. I could see Gaiman’s appeal in the way he can make the script portray a visual that the artist can then execute, while also letting the artist have license with the work as long as the overall point of the panel is displayed.

As a smaller unrelated side post, I found myself liking Dr. Destiny from the first volume, which worries me some, honestly. Yes, he’s crazy and the things he makes the people do in the diner are haunting enough to stay in your mind long after you read/see the pages, but I still enjoyed him because he was memorable, problematic, and well…crazy.

I’ve come to terms with Gaiman’s Dr. Destiny though an analogy. It’s like he’s a balloon (a red one if I had to guess). Sure he makes kids run after him into oncoming traffic and he’ll pop in your hands causing you to lose both your eyes (Freud reference), but at the end of the day and at the ends of the deaths, Dr. Destiny is still a balloon, and he needs to be put back with all those other crazy balloons that could and would wreak havoc on humanity if set free.

Rorschach’s Image of Haunting Embrace

Rorschach, also known as Walter Kovacs, seems morally frozen in his stances of what is good and what is evil. Rosen speaks to this as she states, “Rorschach is the dark side of nostalgia” and “It is clear that Moore and the creators meant for us to read Rorschach as the vessel of an outdated morality” (90). The morality in Rorschach’s view of the world not only pertains to how he judges things in his life, but how he perceives visual images as well, especially the image that is often repeated in his life, the one of distorted intimacy in a couple’s embrace.

Walking in on his mother having sex was to him a source of “Dirty feelings, thoughts and stuff” which “upset him, physically” and made him “feel bad just talking about it” (6:32). While he seems to want to avoid the subject of the “Siamese twins, joined at the face and chest and stomach,” he cannot escape the imagery as he sees it splashed in his vision at any sight of intimacy (6:32). He psyche is scarred by the scene of his mother with that man who was a stranger to him and the subsequent trouble he gets into from breaking up their brief union. It seems so scarred that, in Rorschach’s mind, all instances of intimacy or of romantic embrace is now deemed to be solely on the side of evil, or if it is not that far, it is surely a sign of immediate discomfort when Rorschach sees these encounters.

This can be seen when he sees the silhouette of a couple in a doorway. Immediately, Rorschach’s response is “Didn’t like it, makes the doorway look haunted,” as seen in the picture below. The image is echoed so often when dealing with Rorschach that it sees like the word “scarred” wouldn’t do his mental disposition justice. “Haunted,” as he put it, would seem more appropriate.

Yet, the ghost is also catching. Following the lover’s inkblot and Rorschach’s story from his childhood, Rorschach’s therapist’s mind view becomes considerably altered by his time with Rorschach (6:3). Dr. Malcolm Long’s marriage deteriorates. He is distracted, almost consumed by his need to understand Rorschach and his obsession with being Rorschach instead of Walter Kovacs. I say it is catching because the therapist seems to have caught the image of intimacy that echoes so often with Rorschach. The therapist sees two people embracing in an image of graffiti, and his comment about them is that “On 7th Avenue, the Hiroshima lovers were still trying inadequately to console one another” (6:27). He may not be as haunted as Rorschach is by the image, but he does view the embrace as “inadequate,” which may be also echoed in the subsequent problems of his marriage.

The haunting image seems so engraved in Rorschach that it becomes a part of him. This can be seen near the end of Watchmen, when Rorschach sees Laurie and Dan embracing after hearing Veidt’s plot. The distorted image of the couple’s embrace that has been following him throughout the novel is displayed on his mask immediately following him seeing the two together. He himself displays the image, only to have it disappear right after.

It would seem that the image of the couple is a visible marker of both Rorschach’s possibly instability when it comes to looking at the world and his distorted view of intimacy in general based on his upsetting childhood.

~Kelley

The Good Coin

My previous experience with Batman and Superman was pretty simplistic. Superman was the one with the big S on his chest. Overall, he was a good guy, and I owned a Super-Girl hat at one time in my life. Batman was different. He was the rich one, the one with the underground layer. He had the cool car, and I didn’t think he had any real talent as a superhero, but he did have the money to make the powers that other superheroes have. After reading DKR, yes, things have changed as far as my perspectives go, and now I’m starting to like Batman more, in comparison to Superman, in large part because of how they look when the two are pushed together.

In DKR, when we see the first sign of the Superman S, I already wanted to paint Superman and Batman as opposites. The flood of media images on Batman, through the panels and panels of news feed, talk shows, and television commentaries, have Batman as the unruly vigilante who couldn’t be bothered to play by the rules because he had things that needed to be done. Obviously, he saw that the laws weren’t working; so why heed them? Superman, however, being called a “Good boy” by the government is shown, right off the bat, to be the errand boy who does play by the rules, and might just like it that way, arguably (Miller 84).

For a while, when I was reading, I wanted to say that Batman and Superman were like the two sides of the Two Face coin, but I’m at the moment not convinced that that’s good enough. It’s too simple, but at the time, I had believed that the theory could work. If they would be two sides of the coin, one constant would be that whatever side the coin landed on, good would prevail. The side chosen would only dictate the means by which the “overall good” would win over evil. Or, in even more simplistic terms, regardless of whether or not it is heads or tails, you would still have a quarter in your hand to buy something with at the end of the day.

Coming full circle, I want to attempt to give my overly simplistic evaluations of Batman and Superman an overhaul, in light of the DKR take on the Batman story. Batman is not the rich guy with a hobby of fighting villains; now, he is the gangster for the good of the people. Boichel describes it as Batman being the “figure who, like the criminals, operated outside the law and on his own terms, yet did so on behalf of the status quo…” (7). Conversely, Superman is now the morally obligated hired help of the powers that be, also known as the government.

If the coin analogy simplifies things too much, does anyone have something better to describe the Batman/ Superman dynamic? Would “more and less complicated shades of good” be any better?

~Kelley