kvaillan-litcomics

Bill Watterson, is my choice for week four's featured artist assignment. I love the style of the Calvin and Hobbes comics, something about the line work makes it very cute and childlike. The punchlines are always very relatable and playing with the idea of Hobbes coming in and out of his stuffed animal form gives a lot of possibilities for the story. I also love the way Calvin is so rebellious, as a child should be, and he fights against authority in the way some children wish they could. Hobbes plays the great contrast to him of being his best friend that can always join in the shenanigans while also being a voice of reason sometimes. Hobbes is the stuffed animal every kid felt that they had, or should have, in their childhood. It's very innocent fun most of the time where the idea of the limits of a child's imagination is played with. These comics also bring up very adult topics, and topics that invoke powerful thoughts. The way Calvin talks makes him seem very intellectu...

Reading Prince Valiant , I can already tell that these comics differ in style with including color and is narrated by an outside voice. I find this format hard to connect with the characters and it gives them a lack of personality. It makes the main character definitely seem like a hero but makes it hard to become a part of the world. I also feel like the comic shouldn't have to be narrated because the audience should be able to tell what's happening by the illustration. It's sort of redundant. As the story continues this tends to get better and the comic starts to break out of its restricting format of only box framed images although they have to number the boxes so that the audience knows which to read next. The later comics solve this problem and improve on the use of the narration. They also succeed in making Prince Valiant more relatable and an iconic character that doesn't get lost in the other characters. Terry and the Pirates , although it is in only black and w...

After reading the comics of Gasoline Alley from 1919 it seems that they are focused around things that were relevant to the time period. Things like "What is your little pet peeve?" are no longer relevant as much to people in this time period. One of the pet peeves was cleaning out soot... I don't think I've ever had to do that in my entire lifetime. They are also related to war time and have a bit of propaganda in them. The comics from 1950 seem to be more tied down to a storyline and has distinct characters. I still find it hard to relate to, or even find a punchline. They seem to relate to married people in the older generations the most. The ones from 2010 feature a lot of older people in their senior years of age. You can really tell how they grew in quality as well with these ones being in color. I think it's fair to say that these comics aged as their audience did. 

 I found some of the typeface and text hard to read from these comics. I think also that comics had pretty dated ideas and concepts. A lot of them I couldn't find the punchline in or I saw it funny for a different reason. For example there's one comic called Midsummer Day Dreams on page 59 of the pdf where a couple is trying to have a conversation while the wife keeps seeing dogs around their table that continue to grow in size. The original punchline is suppose to be how she is day dreaming all the dogs and is unable to pay attention to the conversation because she is falling asleep. I found it funny because this women is continuously pointing out this giant dog which the man continues to ignore or refuses to notice. So I saw it as the man was the one being ridiculous and was ignoring her, not that she was the one in the wrong. The man is also talking about himself the whole time and being incredibly self-centered. I thought the P olly and her Pals comics had a very appealing...

  1. Who do you think buys and reads Archie?  Why do you think they buy and read it? I think a younger generation of kids read these comics because the main characters themselves are high school students. So it’s likely middle schoolers who are about to go into high school and know what it’s like. Kids who are going through their first struggles of discovering how relationships, or want to know how they work. Preparation for high school. 2. What in Archie repeats?  What characters, situations, ideas, props, themes or other factors repeat through the various decades of Archie?  What ideas or emotions do you think get attached to these repeating aspects of the storytelling?  What is important in Archie? Archie seems to be a ladies man who’s conflicted between two girls. Jughead is sort of the opposite of him. The complications of interpersonal relationships. The struggles of high school. Coming of age situations. A lot of high school situations. But Betty and ...

 I found it interesting that a lot of the points her was making at the beginning were very similar to what I'm used to hearing in my story boarding class. For example, creating clear facial expressions and body language to communicate emotion. He also mentions the importance of figure drawing to improve his work. Camera difference is emotional distance is something we hear in class all the time and he describes this well in choice of frame. His visual framing for the flow of the comic page is really interesting to me. Usually when I thumbnail I don't realize the story could be more compelling with different sizes through the page. He conveys this to his audience very well with visual examples. Also removing pieces can change the story, or switching the panels, like a puzzle that creates a different image every time. He also gives great examples for how important word choice is and how to utilize it in accompanying images. One note that he mentioned was how important eyes are to...

 In The Arrival by Shaun Tan, the graphic style is incredibly exciting and hard to ignore. My experience while reading left me completely captivated by the story and how it was expressed in the drawings. While reading I couldn't help but make a connection to the protagonist and what it must be like to come to a new country as a refugee. He needed help understanding the language, heard war stories told by others, and worked while waiting to be able to be with his family again. The way the war stories were depicted were incredibly unique and rendered the victims as defenseless to these adversaries. The dark tentacles wrapping around his home, or the place he came from, appeared incredibly threatening and spooky. Although the new place he inhabits is strange and unfamiliar to him it appears safe, warm, and welcoming. To help enhance that feeling is his little animal guide, which is for sure strange but gives off a gentle personality. A scene that captures this completely is when the p...

First of all, I just wanted to mention that the technique of presenting history in comic format is really interesting to me. I enjoy the use of storytelling as a way of sharing information with the audience because I am a very visual learner. What stood out to me the most as culturally significant was page 96, Evolution of the Superhero , when comparing the golden age, silver age, and modern age of comics. It's really funny how obvious superhero comics have changed over the years when put into their example. The story line becomes more complicated and so does the costumes. In the modern age the villain doesn't have a reason for why he's evil, he just is. Also explicit content is used more freely, like killing off the damsel-in-distress. The most relatable comic I can think of would be like Deadpool , full of adult content and explicit language. The superhero definitely is more complicated, Antiheroes are more popular now as well. It's also crazy to hear about comix duri...