Lit. of Comics Blog

Maus is a very moving. It takes the medium of comics to a whole new level, with its very personal storytelling and narrative. I think the best part about how this biography, is how it is structured. The dialogue is very believable and feel like real people naturally talking to each other. I also found it very interesting that the author included the moments of conversations between himself and his father. Going into this book, I thought that it was just going to be completely involved in a personal story of the holocaust. I didn't expect it to also show the real life aspect of what was happening in the present (at the time it was written). Up until now, all the comics we had read have been very character and plot driven. This comic however, very much showed the author's connection to underground comics. Halfway through volume one, we are shown an underground comic that he made about his mom's suicide and how it affected himself and his father. It was very personal and hon...

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...

Shaun Tan is a brilliant illustrator and storyteller. He is able to have such an absolute command of the medium (picture books/ comics) that makes his works easily understandable for a wide range of readers, be it young or old. Tan utilizes a surreal element in The Arrival  that makes it clear to the viewer that the world he is entering is very much different from his own. This is a very effective way of portraying the harshness of moving to another country with different languages, different culture, and different people. I don't think this kind of a message would be as easy to understand if he hadn't taken the surreal approach, because everyone and everything would still look so similar. The two contrasting worlds wouldn't look different enough to have as much of an impact without words to help it along. This aspect of The Arrival  I feel was integral to the work standing on its own as a wordless narrative. I initially read  The Arrival  a couple years back in my...