Lit of Comics & Graphic Narratives

 I was trying very hard to piece together what this comic was about, but I think I finally understand what's happening. It's pretty much a comic about a little boy named Nemo who has fantastical dreams with recurring (albeit racist caricatures) characters that explore their whimsical, and experimental comic-wise, surroundings.  I though these comics were particularly interesting since I was finding it hard to understand the purpose of them. Maybe that is because modern comics always have a set theme or genre they fall into that can let the reader know, "Hey, this is what this book will be about." But I think the entire point is just following these characters on weekly adventures in Nemo's dreams. McCay seems to know about the common dreams most people have that signify something, i.e. drowning or getting lost amongst an oddly distorted Mc Escher hallway.  I think the defining features of this comic are it's style and structure. I will say, besides the blatant...

 In sophomore year, we had to read parts of this book so we could understand how to storyboard/make animatics better. I'm excited to be able to read the entirety now, as it was amazingly helpful before! Not sure if counts, but here is the comic project I made sophomore year using parts of the book as reference on how to create each shot. It was made with an ink brush and took ~5 days to complete (and so much ink). It was on poster paper, so it was ~30 x 20 inches as well. What I loved about this book, is that it teaches you things about comics you never think about unless you plan on creating them. Things I understood without knowing the context behind them, finally started to make sense after reading Scott's witty, easily digestible explanation of why comics are structured like how they are.  I think a great topical take-away was his description of word/picture combinations. We talked about wordless comics last week, but knowing when to use words to control the reader's fo...

 This one was very hard to translate because I was trying so hard to comprehend the pictures. Maybe it's because I'm having a hard time deciphering what's even in the photos due to lack of contrast in some of them. I definitely think it has something to do with livestock. I've heard that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an allegory for how awfully we treat pigs and cattle, and I feel like this might be going in the same direction, just with chickens. The chickens in almost every photo are torturing, stalking, scaring, or kissing humans. I think this is talking about how we treat livestock as pets, but will ultimately use them for what they're worth and end up culling them in the end. Even the kissing makes sense to me because people love their pets and kiss them all the time. I'm not a pet owner or a vegan/vegetarian, but I feel like that's what is being said here. It could also be a bit more general than that as well. It could just be talking about how humans...

 I've loved comics my whole life. In fact- I like reading them more than I do reading normal books. But there was always this part of the community I could never touch just because it wasn't my style. Unfortunately that part of comics makes up a majority of the community: Superheroes. I could never get into it. No matter how much I tried, the art styles, content and designs left me feeling absolutely nothing. Eventually I gathered a lot of information through osmosis from friends and cousins who were interested the genre. I know about Stan Lee. Not a whole lot, so there was a lot of new information here to shock me, but he's always been successful (at least for as long as I have been alive) so I never really thought about how he got to where he did and the mountains he had to climb in order to achieve such notoriety. It's not that I didn't think he worked hard- it just never crossed my mind.  Learning about how Stan Lee treated his artists after he was thrown around...

This beautiful piece captures the uncertainty of those who've experienced immigration face, while not being entirely negative. It shows the humanity others are capable of giving despite there being a language barrier. It gives hope to those who are going into personally uncharted territory that there will always be kindess. We follow a man leaving behind his wife and child to move to a foreign place in hopes of a better future for his family. Along the way we meet some characters that help our main hero through his transition into a foreign land. In the end, his family is finally reunited with him and they are able to be together in this new place. What I loved about this piece is that it was abstracting a very real subject. Even in the beginning of the book where the dedications go, it says "for my parents." You can tell just from the drawings that there was a lot of love put into this piece. It was personal, but abstracted enough so that anyone could understand and appl...