Comics

    Young Romance might have become my favorite thing to read. The dramatics of the characters and over-the-top scenarios remind me of old telenovelas (Latin American soap operas)  that I used to watch with my mom. I think this why I found Kirby and Simon's  Young Romance so appealing, even though I can't relate to the over-the-top scenarios the characters find themselves in, they still had me hooked and eager to find what would happen next. There is consistency within the characters and events. Even though each had a different leading lady with her own romantic interest, most followed the same trop of the girl and the guy falling in love than one of them leaving the other. I think by doing this, it leaves us wondering what happened next, as well as give a clear path to what kind of lesson was learned. My favorite of the ones I read, The Pitiful Story of a Girl Who Could Find but One Solution to Her Tragic Love,  gave me some ...

       The first thing I did notice about these cartoon strips was the heavy stereotyping of ethnic groups, and that included the dialogue and grammar choices. For instance, in The Katzenjammer's Revenge or...Such is life on the ocean wave! I noticed that despite it being in English, there were some substitutions of the letter W to a V, which in pronunciation has become a stereotype of the German accent. Along with visual clues we can come to the conclusion that these are sailors. In The Newlyweds- their baby,  the choice of speech for the characters is stereotypical to that of an British person, this is also emphasized by the fashion of the characters, which was very similar to 1900s London fashion.        In Naughty Pete by Charles Forbell, Pete's speech bubble is more playful and childlike than that of his parents. That choice sets the overall energy of Pete's character and really bring life to him as a naughty, little kid, as his ti...

I didn't grow up around  Archie  comics but, when I moved to the states with my family years ago, they would be at the cash registers of big grocery stores. Although they weren't of my interest, reading them now is interesting especially because characters like Reggie and Betty would've been on my list for most dislikable characters.  What I noticed in the first couple of them was what goes around comes back around. Almost like a karma situation where it comes back to bite you.  Another thing I noticed was the repetition of the characters playing in the same kind of situation. For instance, it felt like Reggie's sole purpose in the comics was to sabotage Archie or anything going good for him. The character of Betty is repeatedly crushing on Archie and will do anything to try and be with him, like plotting with Reggie if it benefits her.  In some aspects, it felt like a good representation of teenage life in a way that sometimes it is very competitive when it com...

  I have recently gotten more interested in comics, hence why I chose to take this class, but I never imagined the complexity that goes into making one, more specifically, the structural complexity. I know now that comics are way more than a simple story with sequential pictures inside panels. I see it now as a form of universal communication even though they come in different languages. What I found most interesting was how different comics by even more different artists follow a similar, if not the same, transitioning tools. His example where he takes Jack Kirby's and Stan Lee's  The Fantastic Four  comic and Herges's  Tintin.  In  Fantastic Four , Kirby's transitions consist of 65% action-to-action, about 20% subject-to-subject, and roughly 15% scene-to-scene. Now, even though  Tintin  comes from a different culture and both comics' styles are wildly different, their transitional tools are still the same. And that applied to American comics suc...

 Une Semaine de Bonte  by Max Ernst really caught my attention, but not necessarily in a good way. The contrast and eerie compositions of each collage left an uncomfortable feeling as I looked through them but they kept me engaged. It was hard to interpret what Ernst was trying to communicate because there can be endless translations to this work, it just depends on the person. The men with rooster heads torturing women felt like karma on humanity, showing that what comes around always comes back. To me, it was more of showing that the way we interact and treat what's around us, wether it be bad or good, it can come full circle. 

 When I first opened the book I was not expecting it to be solely imaged. The first pages of pages, an introduction to the characters of the story I believe, felt more personal as I looked at them. Each portrait held its own emotions and stories without needing words. Each character, I could tell, will have a crucial part to the story.  As I kept reading I felt eerie. The illustrations have an overall grey-ish tone. The attention to detail of each one kept me engaged. The first chapter I interpreted as a goodbye, where the family is accompanying the father to wherever he will be departing from. Their surroundings were almost surreal and a mystery to me, the shadows of what looked like a giant serpent left me intrigued.  Overall, the story kept me engaged as I tried to figure out the purpose of the father leaving his family. He arrived in this place where life seemed better. He stayed and learned the ways of life and the customs of the people. He found friends who helped h...

 My family would read a lot of newspapers. As a kid, I would grab the newspapers to look for the comic strip from that day. To find out that children, decades ago when the comic strip became very popular, would do the same is very cool. I never paid much attention to the history of comic books and strips, but finding out the comic strip, first published in 1896, was surprising.  It is impressive how Hearst published the very first comic strip, not knowing it would set off an entirely new genre. A genre where every artist feeds off each other's ideas to make new characters and new scenarios, cleverly making them their own. Something I found very interesting was the intense competition between different comic strip artists and publishers. It is very similar to that of the industry we are in as illustrators. We feed off each other, inspiring one another but still striving to stand out in the crowd with the best idea.  From these artists, we have gained characters that shaped...