Skip to main content

Week Eleven: Contemporary Comics

This week for comics as contemporary literature I read Transmetropolitain by Warren Ellis and The Bus by Paul Kirchner. I think it’s really refreshing to see contemporary comics grow up a little with their audiences and tackle more literary topics. I love the simple yet somewhat profound themes handled in The Bus, and really enjoy stories in general that create a space to break the rules, leaving one magic stationary place that you can count on, piloting through the madness with the regularity and drollness of a bus stop.


I also thoroughly appreciated the subtle nods towards Hunter S Thompson in Transmetropolitain – although I hardly think the good doctor himself would have approved. In one of his documentaries, Thompson goes into a bloody rant in the middle of his kitchen when the first directors set to direct Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas try and turn his famous San Francisco “Wave” speech into a cartoon. Thompson hated being characterized, especially as a cartoon. When asked about his reaction to the Doosnbury character “Uncle Duke” at a Colorado lecture, Thompson expressed both anger and irritation stating, “Some people grow up and want to be firemen, and some want to be president; nobody wants to grow up and be a cartoon character.” According to his first wife Sandra, Thompson often struggled with separating himself with the image he created of Raoul Duke. This duplicitous situation often created an uncomfortable set of expectations by his admirers, which he wasn’t always comfortable with.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week Six: Underground ComiXXX

I really loved how music was integrated into this weeks reading. Both the music and the art styles seemed to twist and flow together in one moment of nonlinear expression. It’s like you could feel the culture of the time, dripping out of its conventional constraints through any and every available crack or gap. The religious experience of Phillip K Dick, was really intense. I've heard a few people talk about his experience before, but had never realized that it was centered on Christianity. I also really enjoyed some of the underground stories and art styles in the Mothers Oats Comix. The pinnacle of this particular reading experience was listening to In-a-gadda-da-vida, while flipping through “The Dope Dealer”. I also really appreciated the diversity of style and storytelling, in “Gay Comix”. It was pretty awesome hearing about different things people had experienced, and seeing the individual ways they wrote about and expressed those experiences.
Post a Comment
Read more

Week Ten: Manga

Barefoot Gen was a really heavy way to begin this class. The perspective was both tragic and very humbling. It hurt to watch, but I’m glad that I was exposed to it. Even though the medium of animation doesn’t typically handle heavier topics like that, I think that the story accomplished what it set off to achieve, and was probably able to convey the story in a more palatable way than a live action version would be able to. I’ve always appreciated Manga, (my gateway to the world of manga being through FLCL) but I think its safe to say that my appreciation has been greatly increased, at times forcibly so, since my time studying at Ringling. Building on what Scott McCloud wrote in understanding comics, I think its ability to be so expressive through various levels of magnification and representation makes it an extremely powerful style, and one that is extremely adaptable, handling both serious and entertaining topics alike.
Post a Comment
Read more

Week Three: The Comic Strip

It's pretty fascinating to see where comics as we know them originated, and how far they've come over the last hundred years or so. It was also really great exploring the medium before the popular notions of what a comic should be like or how they should read were set into stone. The sheer lack of regularity was awesome to see, and it was great that artists and writers were exploring a multitude of styles and techniques so early on, and that everything from Krazy Kat to Peanuts was executable and available. That being said, there were definitely times when some of the storytelling techniques made it extremely difficult for the reader to stay in the flow of the story. Like Windsor McCay's lengthy word explanations of what was happening to Little Nemo, as its happening to Little Nemo. I will say however that the artwork and humor in Little Nemo far outshines any and all awkward writing conventions.
Post a Comment
Read more