Literature of Comics & the Graphic Narrative

Underground Comic -Mr. Natural / Tits & Clits Comix- Although I was warned that “many of these comics are sexually explicit”, those comics were way more explicit than my expectation; in fact, I expected the contents including sexual innuendo, not the actual depictions of sexism, racism, and so on.  The first underground comic I tried was Mr. Natural by Robert Crumb. To be honest, I was pretty uncomfortable reading it. I was especially shocked by the story of Mr. Natural with an overgrown baby; not only sexism but pedophilia is explicitly depicted. The interesting thing is that I find those sexism in cartoony style more offensive and disturbing than those in realistic style; I think it is because I have a perception that cartoon is more toward the younger audience and thus the contrast of adult contents and cartoony style is odd for me.  I also read Tits & Clits Comix ; I chose this comic because I was interested in the fact that it is an ant...

Blankets by Craig Thompson      Reading Blankets by Craig Thompson, I was surprised and fascinated by how deep and profound story the graphic novel can tell. Even though it is a graphic novel which has much less words than the novels, I felt that Blankets ’ visual storytelling covers up those explanation with words.      My favorite part of Blankets is how Craig’s young adult experience is paralleled with his childhood experience. It is an autobiography, but Craig Thompson utilizes a lot of exaggeration and representation in his art; I think that those exaggerations make the story even more realistic because they deliver the strong emotion to the readers. Especially when Craig was small, for instance, that the cubby room’s bed is depicted as a monster with full of spiders. Another example is that the lady at the church (page 61) is portrayed fearfully; it is an exaggeration, but the exaggeration tells us that the teaching from lady which seems like...

Fleischer Studio      From several Fleischer Studio’s cartoons I watched, Minnie the Moocher was one of the most memorable cartoons for me. I was interested in its bizarre style, rhythm, and combination with jazz music. Also, the fact that Minnie the Moocher does not have a continuous storyline reminds me of the comic strips from this time period.      Minnie the Moocher , which takes its name from Cab Calloway’s song, is a combination of animation and music. Although there is a plot—Betty Boop runs away from her house with Bimbo and meets the ghosts singing Minnie the Moocher — , the storyline is not solid. Instead, this cartoon shows Fleischer Studio’s technique and new invention: rotoscoping. In order to animate Calloway’s dance, the dance is filmed and projected onto the back of a glass easel so that the motion can be traced on the paper. The interesting point is that it can be seen that only Calloway (the ghost dancing like Calloway) is rotoscop...

Shadow and Texture in Hergé and Carl Barks' comic For this week, I read Explorers on the Moon by Hergé and The Hard Loser by Carl Barks. Needless to say, the stories in these comics are much complicated and have continuous storylines from the beginning to the end compared to the comic strips from last week. However, another factor interested me was their use of shadow and texture.  The comics by Hergé and Carl Barks have a very similar style in terms of shadow and texture. Although shadow and texture can be seen in the background, such as major cast shadows on the ground, both Hergé and Carl Barks rarely use shadow and texture on the characters; the characters are drawn with clear, minimum amount of lines, and painted with one solid color for each section (e.g. wrinkles on the shirt is not darkened). I relate this characteristic to the explanation in Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Without shadow and texture, the characters in Hergé and Carl Barks’ comics stay a...

Peanuts  For additional readings of this week, I read more Peanuts by Charles Schulz. By reading the Complete Peanuts 1950-52, 1959-60, and 1997-98 , I was able to see how Peanuts developed through its run. In 1950-52, the look of the comic’s characters is very different from now. Charlie Brown does not have his iconic pattern on his T-shirt until page 36, and even the number of the character is much less than later Peanuts . However, the biggest difference might be the design of Snoopy; in the early comic strips, Snoopy looks more generic dog and has less character than now. The impression I get from the early Peanuts is “Charlie Brown and his friends”; the other characters are not very unique and do not have a solid personality. However, by 1959, the design of Peanuts became much closer to the one in recent years. Though background still remains simple, the character design become more complicated. Each characters are easily identifiable because of their unique hai...

Little Nemo and Krazy Kat For this week, I read multiple comic strips made in 20th century. I especially would like to compare two comics, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat . Even though they are both highly regarded comic strips in the same time period, they have very different characteristics. Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo is a full-color comic strips started in 1905. The section I read is Little Nemo in the Palace of Ice . First of all, I was impressed by its beautiful use of color and detail. It is interesting that the whole story in Little Nemo is actually Nemo’s dream. The final panel in which Nemo wakes up is always very simple (white bed, gray wall, etc.); it gives a great contrast between Nemo’s real world and his colorful dream world. Little Nemo uses a lot of action-to-action transition and thus it is easy to read what is happening in the scene. I feel that the gags in Little Nemo tend to be soft, not really emphasized; it is because the ...

The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reininger - comparison with a wordless comic, the Arrival -      Lotte Reininger’s the Adventure of Prince Achmed is a film with no spoken dialogue. I found that there are similarities between this film and a wordless comic, the Arrival by Shaun Tan.       While the Arrival is completely wordless, there are written plots between the scenes in the Adventures of Prince Achmed . However, those written plots are just minimum, which is necessary to tell the characters’ name, locations, time, and so on. The reason for this difference between two works might be the amount of detail; in the Arrival , the artist is able to show the details of locations and characters by its art and thus it does not require any words. On the other hand, the Adventures of Prince Achmed only uses silhouette to tell the story and thus the amount of details is more restricted. However, similar to the Arrival, the Adventures of Pr...

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud   For me, a beginner of learning the literature of comics, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics was full of new and fascinating information. I was especially interested in the section explaining the “Transition Scale” in comics.   According to Understanding Comics, the scale of transitions from panel to panel can be sorted into six categories: 1. moment-to-moment, 2. action-to-action, 3. subject-to-subject, 4. scene-to-scene, 5. aspect-to-aspect, and 6. non-sequitur. In this book, the types of transitions in famous comics are broken down and shown as bar graphs. An interesting fact shown in the graphs is that while types 2-4 are common in Western comics, Japanese comics have high incidences of the fifth type, aspect-to-aspect. Although aspect-to-aspect transition is most often used to establish a mood or a sense of place, Japanese comic artists including Osamu Tezuka use this transition so that the readers assemble a single...