Lit of Comic Blog

The Gay Comix was very interesting because all the stories in the book are written by lesbian, gay, or bisexual artists. I feel like it was especially valuable considering the time period when it was produced. At the time, people with other sexualities are very often being looked down upon and marginalized, but this comic gave them a chance to express themselves and their stories underground, free from the rules and judgements. It helped to give me a better understanding of peoples' lives as being gay. One of the comic talked about having sex and struggles between the black and white race. While I was reading, I noticed that the black characters are not as stereotyped as within the above ground comics. They are being portrayed as characters with their own personality and appearance rather than a common caricature of a black figure. To me, it seems like the artists focused on the characters’ story and feelings more than their color of skin or gender. I think this might be bec

I feel like Craig Thompson and Will Eisner all have their unique approach of creating their comic. While reading their comics, I noticed a variety of visual similarities and differences with the two artists’ styles: I like the style art and storytelling for both artists. However, I think Will Eisner’s work affected me more on a personal level. I felt like Will Eisner’s representation of the life of the poor and minority and ethnic identity in the “contract with god” has a very strong emotional impact to the audience. It affected me both because of his realistic, but exaggerated art style and also the fact that the story is not in traditional comic book panels. In "contract with god", Some of the panels are almost picture book like while other panels are designed with the shape and sizes just for expressing the character’s emotions. I feel like this dynamic way of arranging the comic panels help to create more possibility to impact the reader emotionally. While I was

One unique characteristic that I noticed when it comes to the age of comic books is that the artists start to gear their comic towards a specific audience group. The style of drawings and the story both evolved to fit their desired audience. The Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics catch young audience’s eyes with cartoony drawing and bright stories, while the superhero comics engages young adults with hope, action, and fights, and the EC comics creates darker stories to fit the adult's taste of wanting more mature and realistic stories. Another unique sign that I noticed is that along with the development of the printing skills, comics start to rely on color language to represent the mood of the story and the characters' personalities. When I read the Superman comics, I noticed that Superman is colored in the most straight forward and primary colors - red, yellow, and blue. While the bad guys of the chapters are commonly colored in dark green or purple, which create strong

While I was reading through comic strips from different authors, I noticed that each artist has a different style of visual storytelling and it covers quite a lot of different genres. For example Windsor’s McCay’s style is very dedicated and artistic, with a more surreal story, while Charles Schultz’s has very simplified and cartoony inkwork and telling a more humorous story. Despite the differences, there are a lot of common characteristics of the comic strips that I noticed. The first characteristic that I noticed is that the comic panels are not as dynamic as the panels in a comic book. The entire layout of the comic is in a rectangularly shaped, normally horizontally organized in order to fit on the newspaper. Unlike the different sized panels of the comic book, each panel of the comic strip usually have an identical size. They are always squared or rectangular, going from left to right in an organized way. The story of the comic strips are mostly individual shorts. Even if it

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud informs the reader about the medium of comic - juxtaposed sequential visual art - using a various interesting methods. What stands out to me the most is his method of using the comic medium itself to explain the knowledge and secrets behind comics. I think this way of providing information is very entertaining, it’s like telling a story within a story rather than reading plain text that explains the mechanics of comics. Most of the panels uses a simplified cartoony style with notan shading and inked line, however, when he explains the different style of drawings, he changes the style of drawing in his panels in order to visually explain the style that he is talking about. I found it very entertaining to see a very realistically sketched character standing right next to a super cartoony narrator. One idea that I found very interesting is the idea of amplification through simplification in pictorial icons. I feel like this idea strongly resemble