Maus by Art Speigelman

First of all, when I saw the naming of the title, I think it was pretty interesting. The pronunciation of "Maus" sounds similar to "mouse," which is the character in the story. The story was written by the comic artist Art Spiegelman after World War II, about what the Nazis did to the Jews, and how did it affect their lives afterward. I think the storytelling approach that Spiegelman took was interesting. Instead of showing vivid blood and tortures from the war, he used cute animals mouses to be the characters, and pigs for the German soldiers in the camp. All of the characters were in minimalistic drawing style, and the environment was, too. I understand the author's intention to not use the visuals of real people but a metaphor of mouse instead-- because it would be too brutal to see those cruel scenes. The minimalistic images gave an emotional break for the readers, so they can read it in an emotionally less intense level, just like watching animations. Also, I think the comic is more words driven than visual driven, the words tell a big part of the story, but the visuals were supplementary. 

In the second part of the comic, his dad Vladek talked about his experience in the Nazis concentration camp. I was surprised to see that Vladek met a "nice" German soldier who saved him a couple of times. Vladek taught the soldier English language; in return, the soldier gave him a fitted pair of shoes, clothes, and decent meals (which to him was banquet meals almost). 

He also told a lot of stories about the little things that happened in the camp which I think was interesting, because I didn't see it elsewhere. Most of the movies portrayed the more significant impact of the war but ignored the details, but the comics showed it out. The scene I liked the most was when Vladek brought his friends a belt and a pair of fitted shoes from the soldier-- he didn't forget his friends even if he receives something. It was the little things that Spiegelman portrayed that were very touching. 

Underground Comics: Mr.Natural

The comics Mr. Natural basically surrounded this one character--Mr. Natural and his journeys. First I read the Mr. Natural's 719th meditation, I realized how he actually wrote in the language of mindfulness meditators. He used a lot of words such as "karma," "raise awareness of higher-self," etc. It tapped into the meditation culture well, but it was somewhat cynical towards the people who meditate or the religious groups who believe in higher-self. 

Mr. Natural's characterization is funny, when he was going to refuse the offer by the meditator, he said, "I left a pie in the oven; otherwise I would..." At the same time, he was kind of annoying because he messed up the meditator guys' practice. It seemed like wherever he went, there would be a drama and a mess. His visual characteristic is also pretty iconic-- bald, long white bear, a gown, fat and short body. It's easily recognizable, and I think it might be one of the reasons why he got so famous. 

There were black people in some of the characters in the comics, and they weren't portrayed nicely. One story centered on how a group of black people robbed a beggar's money and required him to give them more later on. They were portrayed as rude and violent. Even the visuals of the black people were portrayed as animals. I don't quite like the stereotypes about the black people here. 

There is another story from Mr. Natural-- Little Johnny Fuckerfaster in the Mr. Natural's comics. It showed a young boy teasing a girl from the street and forced her to perform oral sex for him. The girl seemed to be obedient and ignorant and did so. She was portrayed as a retarded adult baby. I don't like how it portrays women in the context, and I think the visuals are pretty nasty. I don't appreciate how the novel portrays the sex scenes; I think they are pretty disgusting. 

I also took a glance at some other underground comics such as Harold Hedd No.1 and Air Pirates Funnies. The Air Pirates Funnies seemed like a re-creation of Mickey Mouse's stories. The majority of the underground stories contained a lot of sexual violence elements and added a "ruffian mood" in them. It is almost a counter-cultural comics at that time. 

Graphic Novels: A Contract with God by Will Eisner and Blankets by Craig Thompson

I read A Contract With God after reading Donald Duck, and I found that the two are so different from each other. In Donald Duck, the background setting is mostly in the rural area, where there are forest, small houses, etc. However, the setting of the stories in A Contract With God is all in the city, in people's apartment. And the approach, is surprisingly realistic, just like the mood of the magazine Humans of New York, talking about the drama of urbanization. There are a couple things that I found interesting from his novel: 

• In the first few pages, there were words intervene with the graphics instead of limited in a box, and the whole page stands out like a poster. The experience is more interactive, and I appreciate it

• The character’s faces changed in different situations. For example, when Frimme's mistress asked him to sell his old building, her face was suddenly so ugly, showing all the little details of his dislike emotions.

• The theme about immigrants and religions is unique. It’s less like the type of funny, entertaining novels, but a more serious one that reflects a social context. But he made it interesting. 

• One of my favorite sentences is “friends came offering comfort words which he accepted in stony silence.” It was said when the main character's family died, and I think the sentence is constructed nicely. It won't have the same effect if it says "friends came to comfort him, and he didn't say a word." The word "stony silence" describes the atmosphere of heavy and depressing very well. 

After researching, I found that Will Eisner's graphic novel usually tell the history of New York's immigrant communities, particularly Jews, including the novels The Building, A Life Force, Dropsie Avenue and To the Heart of the Storm. Moreover, the Stories reflected the community and society at that time, rather than stories focus on the character styles. 

Wes Craig Craig’s graphic novel Blankets, on the other hand, tells people a lot about the narrator’s psychological thoughts, shown in the stories of his brotherhood and schooling. It is interesting to find out that they were actually based on his brother and his real experience. And a lot of people who have siblings like me can relate to the childhood experience that he wrote about.

Interestingly, both of Craig's and Eisner's novels include the theme of religions. Christianity definately played a role in their novels. Craig had once said, “I'm playing with Islam in the same way I was playing with Christianity in Blankets, which proved that the topic of religion isn't just in one of his novels-- it is a big element in his work. 

In general, I appreciate Craig's graphic style which has exaggeration which presents the characters vividly and brought out the stories. I also like Will Eisner’s topic of the immigrants because they were unique, and they reflect humanities that I haven't see elsewhere.

The Comic Books: Carl Barks & Tintin

After looking at Carl Barks’s paintings of Donald Duck and some research about it, I found something interesting. Donald Duck has traits of a stingy and rigid personality. It seemed like an unpopular personality, but people like its character. I think it is the most successful part of the character recreation— it turned a character with a lot of negative traits into a popular character, through humanization and humor. Donald Scrooge’s character has an outstanding trait that he loves money to an extreme degree. He never forgives any opportunities to find golds. He doesn’t find money only to live a wealthy life, the money he owns surpassed that—it becomes his aspiration to find money, like chasing his dream. He could go sailing or mining for finding golds and doesn’t care whatever he does. As long as he can swim in the sea of gold and money, it makes him feel good; money is his spiritual support. I think it is truly an interesting character how persistent he was. Just like what the social commentaries said: “the character shines through his persistence despite the obstacles.”

Tin Tin on the other hand, usually tells stories about the unexpected things happened in another country. Tin Tin is different from Donald Duck’s stories which he brings people on adventures and opens a whole new word for the readers. But Donald Duck is more about how unusually but funny the characters are, how Donald Duck reacts to the situations, and the interactions between his nephews and him also become the highlights. 

From my observation about the comic books and comic strips, I think comics strip focus on small pieces of stories while the comic books focus on a certain topic or genre as a whole and the type of content is consistent throughout. 

Peanuts and Flash Gordon Dailies (1959)

My favorite of all the comics for this week is Peanuts. Unlike the others, Peanuts has a particular format in which it tells a story within four panels or a page. Although there are many pages, there never be repeated stories. The stories are precise and fun, which reminds me of how advertisements usually are--quick and to the point. Another interesting thing is that I could see how the character develops over a period (I read Peanuts Vol 1 1950-52), and throughout the time, Charlie and Lucy went from action-directed stories--some short stories didn't even have words, to conversation based stories. There are more contents and shows more of their personalities. 

Another story I read was the Flash Gordon Dailies talked about Flash Gordon, who committed missions of protecting the earth and killing Skorpis in space. After he completed a task in space, Gordon came back as a celebrity among the astronauts. However, he has to go on another trip—which he said was the last trip. Before he went on the last trip, he proposed to Dale, but he met Ellta, a woman he fell in love with before. He didn’t get together with her again, but he was fallen on a weird planet. On the journey, he found more Skorpis and went on a battle with the Skorpis with his army. He faced a tension that he and his army might be killed there; it was Ellta who saved him and his staffs from the place to the earth. Upon their arrival, Ellta threatens Gordon to not marry his fiancé, or she would ask her army to destroy the earth. An incident happened that they found a lot of Skorpi spies on earth and so Ellta decided to move on and fight for another battle with the Skorpis, but it didn’t stop the new Skorpis landing on earth. 

I think the story plot is pretty common. It was mostly about the fighting against the Skorpis, and the romantic parts with his fiancé when he came back. The tension was usually when Gordon and his army was risking death before they killed the Skorpis. The art, on the other hand, is surprisingly very detailed, the characters’ faces are semi-life-like. However, I can imagine that it would be a popular story in the 50s because going into war, fighting against the enemies, and soldiers returning for the start of romantic stories are the prevalent themes. 

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

I think the information presented in this comics is by far one of the most critical knowledge I learned at school. It mainly talked about six aspects of comics, from its definition, how it works, why it engages the viewers naturally with its form, the language of comics, types of transitions between panels, and the six elements of comics. I think they will be beneficial in my future working in the art and design field, and I would like to summarize the ideas in the following paragraphs and write some of my thinking about them. 

Definition & essence 

Unlike the other arts or designs, comics was called sequential art. However, the name was very controversial, so the name has changed to sequential visual arts, juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, etc. People eventually decided to change it to a new name-- Comics. I think it is brilliant to create a whole new abstract new instead of a name describing the form or characteristics of comics, that way people can bring in their imagination of what comics is, and people can also change its form creatively. 

How it works and why it engages the viewers naturally? 

Comics are made of mostly pictorial icons, and they are less detailed than the real images. The simplified icons eliminate the unnecessaries, and it amplifies an effect by focusing on a specific part. With a simplified version of the icon, it also makes the viewer project themselves onto the character (the masking effect) and engages the viewers that way. Comics also engages us in both the realm of the concept such as the story and the realm of the senses such as the experience of driving a car (in which the car becomes part of our identity). It reminds me of Shaun Tan’s illustrations in The Arrival. The character arrived in a fictional city-- it is beautiful, complicated, and very much simplified to show the concept of his inner psychological world.

Comic as a language

The language of comics is seen as a pictorial vocabulary composed of words and icons, closure and gutter. A beautiful metaphor is that "visual iconography is the vocabulary, closure is the grammar; closure is the blood, gutter for the vein."It also mentions that to create a unified language of comics is to make pictures and words equal. It meant to make pictures more abstracted from "reality" and required greater levels of perception (more like words); while to make words are more direct and require lower levels of perception and are received faster (more like pictures). It reminds me of how most of the trends of advertisements are-- it needs both to complete the concepts. 

Types of Transitions Between Panels

There are six types of transitions between panels: moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, aspect-to-aspect, and non-sequitur. Most of the Comics in the West and the East has more action-to-action panels while Japanese tends to use more subject-to-subject and aspect-to-aspect panels than the Western comics. Action-to-action comics convey the concept in a concise and efficient way. On the other hand, aspect-to-aspect transitions present a mood or sense of space. Time seems to stand still in this quiet moments. I think some of the Japanese comics with that tells stories by switching different perspective gives the viewers to read from the “God's perspective,” someone who can transit from aspect to aspect. 

The six elements of comics

The six elements are purpose/idea, form, idiom, structure, craft, and surface. The book called in "the six steps of comics" while I would like to call it the six elements because I see it from an analytical perspective and I think the comic is complete with the six elements. Artists start from the surface to the craft, to the structure, the idiom--which is unique to the artist, and eventually, the artist picks either the conveying purpose/idea effectively or creating innovative form because doing both may result in "car crash" in the comics. However, when both of artist with innovative form or with purpose/idea, question themselves "why am I doing this?" to innovate from the most fundamental setting in Comis. 

I think the six elements help us to see beneath the crafts and discover the science behind comics and even design. When facing some difficulties in creating comics, I believe it can help us to analyze and assess our work in a systematic way and find a way to build up methodologies to revise our comics. I can't wait to try it on my work. 

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is a story about a man’s immigration to a new country. He had to separate from his family from home; he saw everything new—new words, new animals, new food, etc. He faced some struggles, but fortunately, he met his group of friends, he eventually found a job and reunion with his family at the end. The ending is very touching— his family, who eventually became the local people, helped the new immigrants, just like people who had helped them. I think The Arrival is a very compelling story. The novel depicted human interactions and character’s inner feelings very well.

One thing very interesting was the moment when the man arrived at the immigration, and right after he got the stamp on his book, he was put in a box, and the box flew further and further away in isolation. He wasn’t physically put in a box, but the graphic vividly portrayed his inner feeling. From my understanding, it expressed the fact that he came to a realization that he had left his homeland and the feeling of isolation became concrete in his heart. I think it portrayed his feeling very well when there is only graphics presented.
Another interesting example was when he first opened the luggage, the first thing he saw from the luggage was not his necessities but the scene of his family eating dinner at the table. It expressed the character’s psychological feelings directly. Furthermore, the first thing he put up in his room was not other but his family portrait, which clearly presented the character’s traits that he cared about his family a lot.
I used to think that psychological feeling is hard to express through graphics without the help of words. I am surprised how Shaun Tan presented the character’s psychological feelings by graphics. His way of surrealistic expression approach is also fascinating and is definitely something worth trying.