Lit. of Comics Blog

I'm not really one for superhero comics, so I wasn't really too enthusiastic about the Superman comic I read in class. Although despite my personal feelings towards the genre, I think that the specific issue I got just happened to be really expositiony and boring. The entire time I was reading it (we switched before I could finish), it was just explaining the entire plot of what was happening, rather than showing any of it. The one I read was about Superman getting an award that was really a bomb, and he lost his memory of who he was and where he came from. He finds some army fatigues and figures he's a part of the army. The whole time this is happening, the frames just show portraits of Superman thinking, or shots of Superman in a field thinking about what is happening. It feels like the panels served no real artistic purpose, and solely existed for the comic to be considered a comic, instead of just some expository words on a page. My favorite part of the comic was the Ba...

I primarily read Calvin and Hobbs and Peanuts this week. I picked these two because they are the two strips I actually read as a kid! Peanuts was always in the newspaper (which was obviously the only thing I was interested in), and my brother had the complete set of Calvin and Hobbs, so I would often sneak into his room to read it. It was really nice to be able to actually see all the nuances in it now as an adult, compared to little I was able to pick up as a kid. Calvin and Hobbs was so intriguing and entertaining for me because the entirety of it hinged on childhood imagination. It also has a lot of nice, little moments of irony that I think are my favorite bits. An example I can remember is the two strips of them going sledding, and Calvin is asking some super deep question about life, and it ends with just some dumb-fun sledding. It breaks up the normal pace and tone of the strip, which makes it feel fresh. Another break that the strip does, is when it goes full force into Calvi...

A major point that Scott McCloud covered is what the different types of transitions are, and how they effect the storytelling of a comic. I've read a lot of comics, and although I've seen many examples of each of these transitions, I never was really aware of or noticed how they all serve different purposes, until it was brought to the center of my attention and broken down in an easy-to-understand way. Exploring and learning more about the actual types of transitions has been very eye-opening, and has helped me to understand the medium of comics better as a whole. Personally, I am quite fond of the moment-to-moment transitions. I feel that they do a very nice job of portraying suspense. I also very much enjoy the aspect-to-aspect transitions because of how powerful they can be in setting the tone of the scene. I grew up mainly reading Japanese and Korean comics, so that might have contributed to my preference in these particular transitions, as they don't seem to be as w...