Tag Archives: Links

Alyse M. Jones — Searcher — Junji Ito interviews

This site has a very interesting and personal fan-conducted interview with Junji Ito:

http://samehat.blogspot.com/2009/01/fantastic-interview-with-junji-ito.html

I really enjoyed this interview because it is so personal and you feel like you are standing in his home with his studio with him.
Quick summary quoted from site:

“Highlights from this fantastic and casual look into Junji Ito’s life & work include:

* Ito-san showing off his original script outlines and rough panel layouts, with descriptions of his process when creating manga.

* A long discussion of the influence of urban legends on Ito’s manga, how he got the idea and visual inspiration for Tomie, and how he became a manga artist.

* A tour of Junji Ito’s studio and art desk, process using mirrors and photo-references in his work, and much more!”

Searcher: Yang and His Life Experiences in American Born Chinese

I stumbled upon this photo gallery during my research for this assignment. Because it’s presented in a photo gallery, I thought it was a much more interactive way to learn more about American Born Chinese. The questions and answers are from an interview with Gene Yang done by America.gov. It won’t let me embed, but if the link doesn’t work, it can be found at:

http://www.america.gov/multimedia/photogallery.html#/4110/gene_yang/

I particularly enjoyed learning more about Yang’s background, which I was curious about after he mentioned in that youtube interview Laura posted that he drew from his own life experiences when creating the stories. I thought his website Humble Comics would have offered enough insight, but I think the questions asked and his responses are interesting. He mentions specific instances in his childhood that inspired parts of the novel and the role religion played, a point Moriah brought up in a First Reader post. Yang also offers his view on modern culture and the impact he thinks it has on the Asian-American community. Towards the end of the gallery, he talks about comics as a medium for self-expression.

Alyse Jones — Searcher — Holocaust Love Stories

Vladek’s love for Anja inspired me to look for other Holocaust love stories.

I found this video telling Masha and Avraham Greenbaum’s story. Their story is different from Vladek’s and Anja’s because it begins at the end of the war when Masha was technically a refugee at Bergen-Belsen rather than a prisoner. The video is interesting because Masha briefly talks about the horrors she encountered in the concentration camp, including lice spreading typhus.

The source seems to be reliable because it is linked with ABC news, but that can sometimes mean little. For example, a famous Holocaust love story about Herman and Roma Rosenblat has proved false, yet it has been featured as true on CBS news http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULcvUxd_Ngo&NR=1, has been made into a children’s book, and is currently being made into a movie http://news.usti.net/home/news/cn/?/news.jews/2/wed/bb/Ayb124897688.Rsad_INV.html.

Searchers: Children of Holocaust Survivors

When I went to look for something to share regarding Maus, the first thing I typed into the search box on Yahoo was “children of Holocaust survivors” because, to me, one of the most interesting things about Maus is how much the events he is writing about have shaped Art’s life. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was something that had been studied and quantified, or if it was just a general idea.

The link I came up with is research on that exact thing.

http://www.aaets.org/arts/art96.htm

It seems that many of the problems Holocaust survivors face–PTSD, depression, etc–are also found in their children. I thought this was particularly interesting in regards to the mental breakdown we know that Spiegelman had in his early adulthood. It tries to explain why this may be as well, exploring the relationship between Holocaust survivors and their children and how they tend to differ from the control group.

All in all, it adds a pretty interesting dimension to the reading of Maus from a psychological standpoint.

Searchers: Nazi Concentration Camps

After reading Maus II, I thought thought about when I visited the Holocaust Museum. The first link is from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum gives a brief overview of what the Nazis tried to do before the camps were used. there are also many links to various parts of the site and also interviews with the survivors.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005144

This second link I found searching google and it has a picture like of the entrance to the camps like in the last pages of Maus I. at the bottom of this link there is another link that shows an article about Auschwitz name change.

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/31

On a lighter note, I found that the clash between Spiegelman and Spielberg was interesting and I found in google books a the part where Spiegelman commented about this part in his life.

http://books.google.com/books?id=uhlOpk8bGoEC&pg=PA72&lpg=PA72&dq=art+spiegelman+steven+spielberg+maus+tails&source=bl&ots=n1fIzC-g5p&sig=7rcoASRM8JZuU8hPIV3ptror4YQ&hl=en&ei=wbDKSo3UDpXdlAfO09SSAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Art from Auschwitz-Birkenau & Maus (searcher: elisa ortiz)

This is a fascinating and very powerful site on art produced by inmates, specifically at Auschwitz, during their incarceration.  Here we can see how art can transcend the most horrific of circumstances and the power of the image/art as a form of documentation.  The art work is from a number of artist inmates, with varying degrees of proficiency using a number of different medium: scraps of paper, ink, charcoal, etc.  An interesting fact from the exhibit’s site states: “The majority of artists who worked at Auschwitz were Polish political prisoners, while most who died there were Jewish artists.” While we are understanding Maus through Spiegeleman’s understanding (a son of a Shoah survivor) , this site allows you to see the artistic depictions/expressions of actual survivors. http://lastexpression.northwestern.edu/intro_frameset.htm

Here is another interesting article about an artist and Auschwitz survivor who did many paintings for Josef Mengele.  Stan Lee, Neal Adams and Joe Kubert got together to create a comic telling the story of Dena Babbitt, the survivor, from her youth and early experiences with art to her arrival at Auschwitz and the art she produced there.  Adams, Lee and Kubert have petitioned for a museum that is housing Babbitt’s work to return them to her, something she has had difficulty convincing the museum to do.  It also mentions a graphic novel by Kubert that is also about the holocaust called Yossel.  Kubert is also Jewish and was born in Poland but grew up in the U.S.  I’m really curious to check his comic out when we finish Maus.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/arts/design/09comi.html?ex=1376020800&en=ac17ff225d6d9a07&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

and one more on Spiegelman’s Maus and Jewish comic book artists, Jewish graphic novels and their influence on the comic book universe:

http://reformjudaismmag.net/04spring/comics.shtml

Searchers – An Informative Collegiate Paper on Watchmen

http://watchmenanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/08/wesleyan-university-honors-college_1443.html

This is a thesis paper I came across while searching for Watchmen related things…I think this is a helpful resource because it gives us the thoughts and opinions of another college-level person, but in a formalized way, so it’s not just some kid rambling on about comics. I found it quite informative.

 

Sorry guys, I didn’t know how to make the url into a link 🙁

Methods of Coloring Comics

 After reading chapter eight in Understanding Comics and knowing the visual assault of color I was facing with Watchmen after having read it a few times, I thought color in comics would be a good topic to find a resource on to share with everyone. In my search, I came across this article in a blog post titled Make It Loud: Comics Color, Kevin Nowlan, and Cosmic Depth by blogger Frank Santoro in Color Comics Issue #2. It was posted on the blog for Comics Comics Mag just over a year ago. Like McCloud in chapter eight, the article discusses the three additive primary colors used in comics, red, blue, and green, but the article elaborates further by addressing the process in more detail. Santoro interviews comic artist Kevin Nowlan, who points out some interesting differences between the older methods of coloring comics by hand and the mainstream methods of today such as using programs like Adobe Photoshop. I had a better understanding of the press and plates operation involved in coloring comics and the job of a colorist and a separator from the article and thought it tied in nicely with the reading for Tuesday.