The Last Hurrah

Well, this is it. The last class and the last post. I'm sure there's something profound that could be said about the end of the year, but right now my brain is too fried from paper writing to think profound thoughts. I've already had discussed Palestine in earlier posts, and I'm afraid there's not much to say about my final paper at the moment, so I thought I'd use this space to reflect on the course as a whole. I'm sure we'll do course evaluations in class, but those things are silly, and I always feel too pressured to finish them quickly to really say anything of substance on them, save for simple comments like "too much reading" or "too many papers". You know, that sort of thing.

I guess I was pretty excited coming into this course. I mean, it's an advanced level English course about comic books. You can't really ask for much more than that at college. Of course, I had only heard of one or two of the books on the reading list, but then again, I'm not a huge comics aficionado. I suppose I was expecting more stuff like Batman, Spider-Man... you know, comics comics (apparently Spider-Man is supposed to by hyphenated?). However, the course is called "The Graphic Novel" and not "Serialized Comics of Your Youth". That said, I didn't dislike the books we read. In fact, this was my only class this semester that I actually did pretty much all of the reading. I will say that my favorite graphic novels were the ones we read at the beginning of the semester, though. Alan Moore is one of the eminent names in comics, and Watchmen and V for Vendetta were fantastic. The book I connected the most with, though, was easily Blankets. Like many people in class, I finished it before we were supposed to because I didn't want to stop reading until I finished it. I wrote by far the most about Blankets--my later posts probably seem half-assed and disinterested by comparison. It was a beautiful story, and although I didn't like the "ending", it definitely proved to me that not every graphic novel has to be a superhero comic in order to be engaging.

That basically covers how I feel about the reading we did for this class. As to papers... Meh. They're papers; it's pretty hard to have "fun" papers. I probably came as close to enjoying writing my manifesto as I have to enjoying anything that I've written. It was rather refreshing to be able write outside of the typical academic prose that I've become so accustomed to. I got to write in first person perspective, address the reader directly (sometimes with naughty words), and pretty much break all of the rules and conventions of formal academic writing. Plus, it was an excuse to talk about two of my favorite webcomics. I don't know if my manifesto would actually convince anyone to read webcomics, but it actually got me more interested in them. So that's good. I think.

As for the final paper... I don't know. I've been having trouble with it, but that has more to do with me not being able to find the sources and research that I want than it does with the assignment itself being bogus. I will say that I found the amount of writing in this course to be very agreeable. I mean, with a course name like "Writing About Literature", you'd expect to be a writing a paper every other week, but we've only had two "papers" as such. I like the blog idea. It lets you say however little or much as you want without worrying about satisfying some arbitrary writing prompt. I bet I've done more written literary analysis in this class than any other without even realizing it because it's been in blog form rather than response papers.

Being anti-social and lazy, I'm not generally a fan of group work. In a way, having to arrange a time and date that everyone in the group can meet on to work on something probably helps me because otherwise I'd just wait until the last minute to do it if I was working by myself. The comic book wiki assignment was alright. I felt kind of silly looking up stuff about comic book characters on the internet and then posting information about them... on the internet. It was nice being able to do everything online, though. I was sick at the time that I was working on it, so I only actually met with my group once or twice. It worked out pretty well, I think. I liked the idea of making mini-comics. It gave us an appreciation of the work that goes into even the smallest of comics. Thankfully, there was someone in my group that had artistic talent and was willing to draw. I didn't like drawing when I had to do it in grade school, and I'm not about to start doing it again in college. I was impressed with the quality of some of the comics, though. Hell, ours turned out pretty well, all things considered. The one request I would make for future projects would be to always have a clearly written assignment sheet that people can refer to when starting out. People like direction and it can be a little nerve-wracking to be given little more than a general idea of what you're supposed to be doing.

The classroom environment for this course was really laid back--in a good way. I think we still got a lot of solid discussion and analysis done without the stuffiness and formality in some other classes. I'm sad to say that I've missed my fair share of classes towards the end of the semester. I feel pretty bad about that, and that's definitely something that I would change if I could do it all again--which I would, since I really liked this class overall. It's been a pretty crazy semester and I'm ready for it to be over, but I'm definitely glad that I took this class.

Crunch Time

One of the major drawbacks to taking three advanced level English courses (four before I dropped one of them) in the same semester is that you tend to get slammed on papers at inopportune times. Right now I'm sweating the ten page research paper that's due for my 461 class on Tuesday, and immediately following that, I'm supposed to have rough drafts of papers for this and another class ready on Wednesday. It's the most wonderful time of the year...

Whining aside, I actually read through most of Palestine. Maybe it was the chance to distract myself with something other than paper writing, but I found myself surprisingly drawn in by the book as I continued to read further than the initial chapter or two that I started last week. I'm fascinated by Sacco's method: he's a journalist basically trying to do a story on the hardships that the Palestinian refugees have faced since the formal establishment of the nation of Israel and the arrival and expansion of Jewish settlement in the area. Like any other good journalist, he talks to eye witnesses, conducts and records interviews with all kinds of people, and of course takes photographs. However, rather than turning this multimedia collection of information into a book, or an article, or a TV report, he creates a graphic novel. At some point the question must be asked: why a graphic novel? Part of it could be that any journalist could go to Israel and do the same thing he did, but he's the only one that's going to try to sell his story as a comic.

But surely the graphic novel medium adds something to the story itself. I guess illustrations add something that even photographs can't capture. Creating a graphic novel really allowed the author to both depict the lives of the Palestinian people in a graphic and moving way, and also to tell his own story. I have to wonder how exactly he did most of the illustration. I mean, did he sit there and sketch what he saw while he was there? He doesn't make it sound that way. Did he draw from memory, or did he take pictures as points of reference and reminders? On a certain level, I guess it really doesn't matter how he created the book: the fact remains that it is a composite of his experiences in Israel. Of course he could be taking some artistic liberties and illustrating certain things selectively or suggestively--that's part of the whole point of the book. He's trying to show the world through his eyes what it is like to live as a Palestinian. Like a few of the other graphic novels that we've read, there are times when the action takes a backseat to narration, and there are only a few images that decorate pages of text. These are usually longer stories narrated from the point of view of the interviewee. It seems somehow appropriate that the author doesn't try to over-illustrate other people's stories. The illustrative style in this work is just all over the place: in some sections (like those described above), it's almost like reading a journal with illustrations due to all of the narration; in other sections there are so many little images in sequence that it's practically like a flipbook.

Adventures in Paper Writing

This is why I hate writing research papers: you have to do research. It's not that I mind reading through stuff and learning more about the subject--that's the whole point of writing such a paper (and I'd rather read about something than write about it, anyway). What I do mind is when I constantly run into brick walls during the research phase. I get into a vicious cycle where I feel like I can't come up with a solid thesis without some good sources to back it up, but I can't find good sources that will help me come up with a solid thesis. I thought that I'd be better at this by now.

Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way. For my final paper project, I want to write an essay that focuses on the unique history and evolution of the manga art form as opposed to western comics. Of course, I looked up "manga" in wikipedia for some general ideas to get started. Then I went to the UIUC library website and started looking for books and articles that deal with manga. Turns out we have lots of actual manga here, but apparently relatively few books that discuss manga. The few that do exist are of course checked out. But hey, I can rest secure knowing that if I ever feel the need to learn how to draw manga, the university has several books that can help me. I'm supposed to have something of substance to bring to class, but I'm still sitting here without even a definite thesis. Bleh.

In other news, I started Palestine, perhaps as a way of atoning for my utter lack of progress with my paper. It's very...political. I mean, Fun Home was maybe a little bit controversial on some issues like suicide and sexuality, and Berlin touches on issues of ethnicity and nationalism during a very turbulent time, but the tone of both works seemed sober and politically conscious, if not politically correct. The narrator in Berlin makes no such effort to hide his convictions and beliefs. He's writing the story for a specific reason--he wants to make people see what he sees. I guess if Berlin is a historical research paper, then Palestine is a persuasive essay. I'm not used to graphic novels having such a stated purpose. The book is unique in other ways, too, of course. For one, the art is...not pretty. That's not to say that it's bad or ineffective, but I suppose it's less aesthetically pleasing. To me, anyway. The author also does interesting things with the placement of the captions and narration. They're kind of all over the place. Sometimes they're kept in the margins, almost like footnotes for the pictures. Sometimes they practically obstruct the pictures and spill out all over the page. And it has the feeling of a journal, with the snapshot-like pictures and the scrawled handwriting commentary. It's less "clean".

Alright, I've broken down. To be perfectly frank, I've shared the contents of my humor folder that are both worksafe and unanimated. For some reason, the animated .gifs don't seem to work correctly when I post them, which is a shame because they're hilarious. To this end I've decided to just start pilfering and appropriating webcomics for my usage here. I'll probably use this space to showcase some more of my favorite webcomics for the rest of the year. This one is called Dinosaur Comics, and though it's not for the impatient, it has a wonderful intellectual charm to it.

So, how 'bout this weather, eh?

I'm afraid this post may not be up to my usual standard of quality. I finished Berlin and wrote about it in my last post, but I haven't started on Palestine, yet. At least I already have the book. At least, I'm pretty sure that I do...

I really haven't gotten any work done on my final paper yet. I wish I could say this was because I was far too busy working on stuff for other classes or because I was out of town for the weekend or something, but I'm afraid that's not the case. I've been out of it lately, but that's no excuse for shirking my academic responsibilities, so I'm going to have to get my crap straightened out. I want to be able to bring something substantive to class on Wednesday, so I guess that means that I've got my work cut out for me over the next two days. I'm sure that I'll figure something out by then. I always do.

Conspicuous Absences

I would just like to state for the record that I really do not like Mondays. That said, I've been missing too much class lately, and I feel pretty bad. This is not the time to be slipping in classes, so I need to buckle down and finish the semester on a good note.

So: Berlin. Upon finishing the book, I noticed a few things that I hadn't earlier; namely, that this is the first book in a trilogy, and that it has the subtitle "City of Stones". I didn't realize that there were very many historical fiction graphic novels, let alone series of them. The subtitle takes on an ironic significance at the end of the story, when rioters throwing stones at the police cause them to open fire on the crowd. I get the impression that I would probably get more out of the story if I was a little bit better versed in my history. I always remember Berlin being associated with its infamous wall, and its subsequent destruction reuniting Germany and ending the Cold War. I'm not used to even thinking of its existence before World War II. Of course it makes sense that the city--very much a melting pot on the edge of Western European civilization--would have seen violent conflict between political factions long before the war broke out.

I'm still a little bit lost by all of the different characters and plotlines, even after finishing the book. I have to wonder if the same characters persist throughout the entire series. That would probably help my understanding of the story. I guess the whole point is to show the incredible variety of people that live in the city. Kurt Severing makes a good point about Berlin being incredible as a city where you can see all different kinds of people "rub shoulders" every day. It kind of reminds me of America, in a way, which reminds me--there is some weird dialect stuff going on throughout the novel. I mean, most of these characters are ostensibly speaking German, but most of them also have a sort of accent. It just feels kind of strange to be reading dialectically unique English speech while still feeling like I've been drawn into the city of Berlin. Also, the songs rhyme in English, even though they're supposed to be singing in German. I don't know why, but I guess stuff like that bothers me. It must be the inconsistencies between seeing a bunch of German names and titles, but then seeing heavily accented English. Maybe I'm just subconsciously questioning the authenticity of a contemporary American author writing a story about Berlin before World War II.

Berlin

Yay for not having to go to the store to buy the book this time! This one has such a snazzy cover, too. Not that the other books that we've read didn't--I just think this one happens to be extra neat.

And I guess the actual inside of Berlin is pretty neat, too. At this point in the class, I'm noticing all of (well, at least more of) the artistic techniques that define great graphic novels: unique scene transitions, unorthodox panel sizes/shapes, panoramic full-page panels that depict one continuous scene, etc... And it just seems like the stories keep getting more and more complicated, too. Blankets was very straightforward and easy to follow from a narrative perspective. Stuck Rubber Baby was slightly more complicated because of its ensemble cast and occasional time-traveling. Fun Home, though not hard to follow, per se, made even more liberal use of non-sequential or chronological story telling. Each chapter was more of a self-contained unit--one isolated aspect of the author's story of her life. It got to the point where I had to question whether or not the whole thing formed a cohesive story, or rather just a loose collection of thoughts and after-the-fact reflections on incidents in her life delivered in a stream-of-consciousness fashion.

And that brings us up to Berlin. I may have said this before about an earlier work, but I really do not know what the hell is going on yet in this book, and I'm halfway done with it! There are so many characters and so many different intertwining plotlines that I can't keep track of it all. I can appreciate that the "messiness" of the narrative runs parallel to the themes of chaos and turmoil that are prevalent in the city at the time, but it sure doesn't make for an easy read. I suppose I still have a rather typical narrative bias--I want to see a main character, a conflict, some rising action, a climax, and a resolution that ties things up for the reader. I've really yet to learn my lesson that most of the graphic novels we've looked at thus far have defied at least some of those basic story telling conventions. In a sense, it's all still there in Berlin: the main character is the city itself, the conflict is comprised of all of the bickering factions within its walls that are vying for political advantage, and the rising action consists of all of the little individual episodes of aggression and intolerance of others' ideas that happen on a daily basis. We haven't seen a climax yet, but I'm going to put faith in the story that there is some larger point that all of these individual stories connect to.

A Modest Paper Proposal

Did you catch the title of the post? Pretty clever, eh? I bet nobody has ever thought to reference Jonathan Swift's infamous essay on the subject of baby eating in order to promote his own work. I'm so original.

Unfortunately, I may have missed a class or two, so I wasn't there when the final paper was discussed. I have the assignment sheet from the email, but it's rather...vague on details. In any case, I an initially tentatively planning to choose the historical research option. Yes, I know it seems dull compared to the other choices, but I figure, hey--I'm already going to be stuck in the library doing research for other English papers, so what's one more in the pile? Believe me, I'm not terribly excited at the prospect of writing another research paper, either, but at least I (sort of) know what I'm doing by now. I did have a friend offer to provide illustrations if I wanted to do something more graphic, but I'd rather not trouble her, as this is my project and all. I was thinking that maybe I could write my paper about the Japanese tradition of manga. Back at the beginning of the semester, some of the chapters from McCloud made cursory mention of manga and its influence on the development of western comics, as well, but he devotes very little space to what could easily be a book unto itself. In fact, I'm sure that many such books exist, and I intend to find them and write a paper using the information I obtain from them. What a novel idea! I'm supposed to have the paper proposal ready for today, but I'm not sure if that means I'm supposed to bring anything actually written to class. At any rate, I've got an idea, and that's a start.

Finishing Fun Home

Okay, back to serious posts. I promise to be more academic in this entry.

I finished Fun Home while working through some stomach problems earlier tonight. At least I was able to get some work done while I was otherwise incapacitated. Anyway, if I thought that Bechdel liked dropping literary references and drawing connections between her family's life and various novels' plotlines earlier in the story, then she pretty much goes berserk in the last few chapters. One can get the gist of what she's trying to convey most of the time, even without possessing an intimate knowledge of all the literary works that she alludes to, but it does get a bit tiresome after a while. The references that I could understand (Taming of the Shrew, The Importance of Being Earnest) really did add to my appreciation for the story, though. However, at the same time, I found myself practically skimming over what seemed to be an entire chapter about James Joyce. I've not had to read any Joyce, but I've heard the horror stories, and I can't help but feel that the author is indulging in literary elitism when she makes repeated reference to a book that very few people have actually been able to read.

Speaking of elitism, holy vocabulary, Batman. I'm very nearly convinced that she made up some of those words, or at least coined them herself. I mean, bathetic? Obtunding? The context was usually sufficient to make sure that I wasn't entirely lost, but sometimes I'd see words and just say, "I'm not even trying to figure out what that means." As far as the rest of the narrative went, I was entertained enough to keep reading until the end. I have to wonder why she ordered things the way she did, though. I can see why chronological order may not have given the story the same effect, but I'm not sure what the seemingly random jumping around did, either. It's as if the entire story is in stream-of-consciousness style. I kept waiting for some sort of climax--and the last chapter did seem to be building toward some final conclusion to the whole affair, but the ending still seemed just as ambivalent in tone as the rest of the story.

Screw This

You know, this has been bothering me for a long time, and I think it's finally time I spoke my mind on the subject. I mean, that's what blogs are for, right?

I'm sick of this class. I'm not even sure why I took it. I mean, seriously: comic books? Who the hell would willingly take a class about comic books? I only took this class because it satisfies an unavoidable requisite for my English Major. God, I wish the school offered more options so I wouldn't have to take such crummy classes. If I hadn't already dropped one class this semester, I'd have dropped this one months ago. I haven't liked a single thing that we've read in this class. And the work is just ridiculous. I mean, two blog posts a week? Who even uses blogs anymore, anyway? I feel like some pathetic high school kid. And don't get me started on the papers and projects. As if I don't already have enough to worry about with my real classes, without making some crappy wiki page about a dumb comic. And a manifesto? I'm pretty sure that the basic prerequisite to writing one of those is that you actually have to care about the subject on which you're writing; I don't. And then we actually had to make a comic. I think I'm just going to stop going to class. I don't even care anymore. We've only got one more paper, and then I can forget about ever wasting my time with this sad excuse for an advanced level English course.

Oh, and by the way, HAPPY APRIL FOOL'S DAY. Yes, I'm aware that it's not technically April 1st as of this writing, but I wanted an excuse to write this post. We're going to talk about the first four chapters of Fun Home in class, but I already wrote about them in Monday's post, so I needed something to write about. Meh, I was never really one for this whole April Fool's thing.

Wrapping Things Up

Well, our mini-comic is due to be presented on Monday, and we should be done...I think. The rough copy was finished with dialog as of our last meeting, so that's good. Everyone seemed fairly pleased with how things turned out as far as the story goes. Hopefully it makes sense and we won't have to explain every panel to the class.

Fun House represents somewhat of a departure from the comics we've read up to this point. The art definitely seems like the kind you'd expect to see in the newspaper funnies. On the other hand, the writing takes on a stronger role here, as in Watchmen. Writing separates literally every panel in the book. The dialog is not as stressed because the narrator really carries the story. The writing and the art seem particularly separate; I think you could just take all of the narration in between panels and turn it into a short story on its own. The pictures provide additional details and sometimes some dark humor, but the words are what drive the story forward.

Speaking of words and writing, I was a bit taken aback by the more intensely literary tone of the story. A great deal of the story seems devoted to finding parallels between the narrator's father and other characters and authors from past works of literature. The author is clearly very well read and seems to want to make sure that the reader is aware of this fact. As an English Major reading this, I can appreciate at least most of the references and allusions, but I have to wonder if they wouldn't turn off some readers. Maybe it's just not meant for a broad readership or something. I like the story so far, though.

A Not-So-Mini-Comic

Allow me to preface this post by saying that I am in better spirits than I was when I last wrote. The reasons are several: I've gotten more caught up on schoolwork in the last few days than I thought I would; I stopped listening to emo music; I realized that I'm actually ahead in the reading for this class; and most importantly, my group's mini-comic isn't due until Monday. Yay!

On that subject, my mini-comic group met after class today. Nichol and I had roughed out most of the story elements in class before break, but we basically hadn't even started on the art or paneling stage. After spending a few hours just filling out the story and sketching the panels out, we decided to call it a day and reconvene to hopefully finish things up on Thursday. In theory, a little ten page comic doesn't sound like too much work, especially if you're not going to agonize over the art. However, there is a deceptively large amount of time and effort that goes into even the smallest of comics. Simply figuring out the story was a task unto itself. In such a project, there is a great deal of evolution and change that occurs to the story, even as the comic itself nears completion. There's always some other element that you could introduce, something that you want to explain better, or go into greater detail on. But when working in such a limited space, you just have to accept that you're not crafting a masterpiece.

For our comic, we made a conscious effort to include some more complicated forms of paneling. I'd say a good half of our comic eschews the traditional page of four to six rectangles arranged in neat order. Instead, we have a few cases where the entire page (or sometimes two) is devoted to a single, continuous scene. Interestingly, though, since our comic takes place in a mall, we realized that the multistory, side-by-side stores almost resemble the panels of a comic. This lends the effect of creating a page that almost looks like it's divided up into normal panels, but upon closer inspection, one can see that they are the individual stores. Anyway, I think it's pretty neat.

Back to Reality

So I arrived at the fair U of I feeling pretty good last night. I had a fairly fulfilling break: I slept better than I do at school, I ate better than I do at school, and I got to see people that I don't normally get to see at school. I also did not do a lick of schoolwork (Hey, midterms were hard and I earned a break, right?). Turns out that may create problems in the very immediate future.

I look over my syllabuses and realize, "Wow, I have crap due in all my classes the week I get back from break." A paper here, some reading there, and--oh, a group project for this class that's due this Wednesday. Not cool. Nobody met about the mini-comic before break because, well...midterms are a bitch and people had enough on their plates as it was without trying to worry about a project due in the seemingly distant future. Of course, nobody is going to work on the thing over spring break--not that we could. People are literally scattered all over the country, making the creation of a comic a wee bit difficult. So now we're looking at a Wednesday due date, giving us Monday and Tuesday to, you know...actually make the comic. To make matters worse, I'm pretty much booked solid Monday. At this point, I'm basically praying for the due date to get pushed back a week or so. Something tells me that other groups are in a similar boat, and the only other major assignment we have left is the final paper, so I'm hoping an extension on this one isn't out of the question.

I should be discussing this week's reading, but I'm still out of gear for academic discussion. I'm basically operating in whiny rant mode, if you couldn't tell by now. I might expand on this post later with some actually relevant material and my typical humorous image, but right now I'm too busy feeling salty and embittered over the end of spring break.

So that's what it means...

The mystery of the title is revealed. And...I'm a little bit surprised/disappointed, I guess. I wasn't exactly expecting some deep secret of the universe to be unraveled, but it just seemed like a throwaway line to me.

Other than that, I found the latter half of the book to be about as enjoyable as the first. The story follows a nice arc, moving from personal recollection, to a wider view of the social problems of the time, and then back to a more individual level. The overall pacing was good, but towards the end I began to get frustrated with the main character's slowness to accept his homosexuality. I know that the whole point was he felt confused and unsure of his sexuality, but it was painful to see him shun his gay friends when they had been supportive and understanding to him. I have to question how much Toland actually changes or matures over the course of the story. For a main character, he seems a little flat, which is probably because he is narrating a story that encompasses far more than his own personal tale.

My complaints about the end of Stuck Rubber Baby are similar to those I had about Blankets. In short, I felt that there was an insufficient amount of closure for many of the characters. In both cases, the story ends with the last chapter flashing ahead to the present, or at least a later time in the main character's life, but without filling in all the details of what happened to the other characters. In Blankets, we never hear about Raina or her family ever again after Craig breaks up with her. I suppose this is more understandable because the story is at least somewhat autobiographical. You don't always get closure in real life. However, in Stuck Rubber Baby, we get very selective information as to the fates of the characters at the end of the novel. We don't know what happens to Riley and Mavis after Toland leaves the Wheelery, we get a throwaway line about Melanie when Toland meets Orley years later, and Ginger and Toland don't stay in touch after she leaves for New York. Hell, we never even find out who the guy that the narrator is ostensibly living with is! Nor why he has that creepy beard. The only characters that really seem to get closure are the ones who die, like Sammy. Even then, we never get the chance to find out whether his family was going to do anything for him.

But I did like the book. For the most part.

Stuck Rubber Baby

I actually bought this book ahead of time so I didn't have to go rooting around bookstores looking for it today. Yay! I think the only book I don't have yet is Palestine, but we're reading that last, so I should easily be able to get my hands on it by the time we get to it. Hopefully.

I found Stuck Rubber Baby a bit easier to get into than was Portraits from Life. I guess that confirms my pronounced preference for a true "graphic novel"--a long single narrative told in a fashion reminiscent of that which you would expect to find in a novel. I was reading the comments printed on the back of the book, and I noticed that one compared Cruse's work to that of Faulkner. After reading the first eleven chapters, I'm inclined to agree. There are a few parallels with Faulkner's work: the southern setting, the focus on a relatively small and isolated community, and the stream-of-consciousness style of the narration. The chronological skipping around was slightly disorienting at first until the story sort of "settled down" into a more or less ordered narrative. However, it is still jarring when there are scenes of the protagonist "narrating" his story alongside a guy who is ostensibly his partner. I think it's the beard more than anything, really. Every time I see it, it reminds me how long it's been since I shaved and how I really should do that before going out in public again. With all luck, I'll manage to do so before class in the morning.

As far as the art goes, I guess I'd place it somewhere between Collier and Thompson. There is a little more playing around with the panels and scenes than there was in Portraits from Life, but Blankets definitely still trumps it in terms of creative use of the space both within and outside of the panels. That said, I felt the art doing a good deal of work in helping me to get into the story. And I think the illustrations are helpful in reorienting the reader when the narrative jumps around in the timeline. I still like Blankets better, though. That's probably because I felt I could personally relate to a great deal of its story, and the notion that it was sort of a pseudo-autobiography made me want to keep reading to find out what happened to Craig, even if I was kind of surprised and disappointed by the ending. It's odd that the biographical angle worked for me in Blankets, but not in Portraits from Life. I came into Stuck Rubber Baby expecting another true-to-life story, but I have to keep reminding myself that not every graphic novel is the author's autobiography.

Portraits from Life

As promised, I have since my last post procured a copy of Portraits from Life. It's amazing what you can find when you go to a bookstore during normal business hours.

To be honest, on the whole I'm kind of indifferent about this book. I mean, Collier uses the comic form to pretty effectively deliver several different vignettes, but I guess I've come to expect a long, unified narrative after Blankets, Watchmen, and V for Vendetta. In that sense, this collection reads more like a "comic", I suppose, but I find myself wondering what the draw is here. Blankets may not have had the political significance of Moore's works, but you could see its value as a sort of graphically enhanced autobiography. Portraits offers biographical stories, but the art here does not seem to enhance the stories in the same way that it did in Blankets.

I don't know--maybe I'm missing something here. The panels are very traditional rectangular affairs and offer little in the way of variety. The illustrations seem less stylistic and more realistic in many cases. I suppose this makes sense given the biographical nature of the work, but I find myself wondering just how much is added by the art. Furthermore, I question the overarching purpose and significance of this work. I guess it's supposed to be a compilation of several interesting slices of life represented through a unique medium, but without the fictional storytelling elements present in the other comics we've read thus far, I didn't feel as motivated to keep reading. Like I said, maybe I'm just missing the point, but this has been my least favorite book thus far in this class. I realize I'm coming off as being awfully critical here, but I'm open to debate and my opinion might change after more class discussion.

Excuses, excuses...

I want to get this out of the way right away: I don't have Portraits from Life at the moment. I was planning on buying it this weekend, but...well, it didn't quite work out. Friday was Unofficial, so suffice it to say that not a whole lot got done. Saturday was my 21st birthday, so again, not much productivity there. Today, I woke up in the middle of the afternoon, and by the time I was showered, dressed, and decent, TPS and the Union Bookstores were closed. Follett's was open, but they didn't have what I needed. Hopefully I'll be able to find it at the other bookstores tomorrow, otherwise I'll probably have to order it online or something. I'll work it out somehow.

Anyway, that means this post is now about the mini-comic. At first, I had no idea what I would want to do. However, as I was sitting in class, listening to the description of the assignment, I remembered a conversation that my friend and I had last semester. We had been talking about how his dad and his dad's dad had both gone to U of I before him, and there was a sort of legacy expected of him. Both men had left their mark at the University, and the same would be expected of him. In particular, his dad told him a story about him and his friends venturing into the underground steam tunnels. We both thought that was a really cool idea since there are openings to the steam tunnels everywhere and you always wonder what's down there.

So we got to thinking: what if there's something down there. Some sort of Cthulu creature that has been lurking down there since the school's founding. Maybe generations of my friend's family line have sworn a blood oath to slay the creature and that's actually why they've always gone here for college. I don't know. We were bored and we have overactive liberal arts major imaginations. But I think it might make a decent enough hook for a mini-comic.

Round Two

This post should finally get me caught up to where I'm supposed to be. I'll do my best not to rehash stuff I've said recently, but I'm running out of material to work with here.

I read Alan Moore's little essay about the creation of V for Vendetta after I finished the comic, and I found it pretty interesting. I think the chronicling of the long creative back-and-forth process between the two men serves as a great example of why comics are so unique. I think my favorite part was where he mentioned that the Muse very rarely delivers an entirely complete idea in pretty gift wrapping. That's especially applicable to a work of serialized fiction. I mean, they obviously had to have a general sense of where the story was going and what they wanted to accomplish by the end, but the story definitely got pieced together bit by bit over a long period of time. Given how long it took them to finish the series, it's rather amazing to me that it all hangs together so well and brings together so many different plot elements. Moore mentions some minor inconsistencies and oversights that were committed in the early chapters, but I didn't notice any jarring contradictions or stylistic changes.

We talked about ideologies present in V for Vendetta last time in class. For me, it's hard to separate the comic from the movie in this regard. The movie really exemplifies and emphasizes certain themes in the story. On the other hand, it changes the story in ways that Alan Moore didn't intend, so I think looking at the film is harmful in this case. One of the themes that is made much more explicit in the comic is that anarchy is not the same thing as chaos. I mean, it's still an incredibly radical political ideology, but to dismiss it as a total lack of order is misleading. V describes it as the difference between the Land-of-Do-As-You-Please and the Land-of-Take-What-You-Want. In the film, the ending seems much more reminiscent of the American Revolution: an overthrowing of a tyrannical system of government for a more democratic one. But V isn't advocating democracy. He's advocating anarchy, which is why he blows up Parliament. It's this sort of radical thinking that is supposed to make us question whether V really is any more than a terrorist. We tend to ignore or downplay his radicalism and assume he shares the same values that we do.

Playing Catch-up

Ok, this time I'm really going to do two posts. I promise. I hope.

It was hard going on the manifesto at first. I typed up two pages for the rough draft last week to bring to class for peer reading, but I ended up scrapping every last word that I had written and starting from scratch. I'm not sure if the six pages and some change that ensued were at all convincing or well argued, but I am sure that I wrote a manifesto and not a persuasive essay. It got easier as I went on and my rant seemed to gain momentum. I always worry about losing focus if I just start writing off the top of my head without taking the time to make sure I'm staying on task, but I guess that's OK to a certain extent here.

Another issue that came up is I realized that I'm not exactly an authority on webcomics. I mean, I follow two pretty regularly, but that hardly qualifies me as an expert on the subject. Furthermore, the webcomics that I follow are video game focused. I tried to write the paper and pick comics that don't require any knowledge of video games. A lot of the strips don't even talk about video games directly, anyway, and I think they're funny enough to stand on their own. Unfortunately, time was kind of a factor when I was trying to print it out in the morning, and I realized that trying to paste webcomic strips onto a Word document is a pain in the ass. I had to really shrink the strips, lowering their quality and distorting the proportions. Hopefully they're still readable. I had wanted to use my roommate's printer, but he was asleep at the time and his printer was low on ink, anyway. So I ended up having to pay over two bucks to print it out in the computer lab. Weak. Submitted below for you entertainment is one of the strips I discuss in my manifesto. It's a Penny Arcade strip ominously titled "I Hope You Like Text".

Bonus Post

So apparently there wasn't class on Wednesday, but there was supposed to be a blog post. In light of this fact, I present to you not one, but two separate posts on the same day. For the sake of simplicity, this post will be about the rest of V for Vendetta, and the next post will be about my manifesto.

As I might have guessed from the disparities early in the story, the endings of the comic and the movie differ a good amount. I mean, the whole Viking funeral thing is still there, but the details surrounding it are entirely different. After finishing it, though, it's given me appreciation for how well the movie follows the excellent scene transitions in the comic. The domino thing was just fantastic, and the movie possibly did an even better job with that part. Also, I hate to say it, but I didn't really like V's death in the comic. Sure, having him die at the end lends a nice martyr aspect to the story, but I don't really see the practical reason for his death. I mean, Finch says himself that V was like greased lightning and the guy basically let him kill him. Even if the film's ending was pretty...well, movie-ish, it at least made more sense that it took a room full of guys with guns to take him down. Even if it did look like something out of The Matrix (c'mon, Wachowski brothers).

I did like the resolution provided for some of the other major characters, though. Evey's torture and training by V are much better explained by comic because we can see that V was training Evey to succeed him. The movie instead chooses to pursue a pseudo-love story, and that seems artificial and unrealistic. I can see why some of the key characters were changed, though. The Leader is radically different in the movie (they even rename him), and I can see why. Susan's obsession with Fate is not only creepy, but the idea of some super computer being used to control society definitely reeks of the 1980's. Ironically, though, in doing so they make the movie seem more like 1984 (the guy who plays High Chancellor Sutler was even in the movie adaptation of the book). Like Watchmen, V for Vendetta is the product of a different political era, and trying to modernize it in a film would make it difficult to stay true to the original story and still have American audiences relate to it. Oh well.

Manifestos Are Hard

In keeping with my tradition of complaining about all the work I have to do in this class, I thought I'd spend some time discussing the rough draft of my manifesto. I really didn't know where to start with this one. I've never written anything close to a manifesto, unless you count message board rants. It's just weird--all your academic life you're told that you have to write argumentative essays in a particular way. You have to have an introduction that introduces your claim in the form of an argumentative thesis, you then have to create a body of evidence for this claim, usually backed by textual evidence or outside sources. You know, that sort of thing. Here I'm just like, "Hey, this is what I think about some stuff you probably don't care about". I don't know, I just hope I didn't misinterpret the spirit of the manifesto.

The hardest part of this assignment for me was finding something that I care enough about to write a five page rant about it. I mean, I can rant with the best of them, but I need motivation and focus. I also wanted to stay away from the typical "Hey, comics are art, too!" line. In that sense, I've probably somewhat failed since much of what I've written thus far revolves around that very subject. Oh well, can't win them all, I suppose.

I've also started V for Vendetta. I watched the movie fairly recently and it's not terribly surprising to see a large number of differences between the film and the original comic. I thought the movie was pretty good, but so far I'd say that the comic trumps it. The movie particularly alters the role of Evey Hammond. Don't get me wrong--I love Natalie Portman and I think she did a great job in the movie. But she can't play a sixteen year old girl anymore and the movie had to be altered to reflect that. I'll have to reserve my judgment until after I finish the comic, though. I'm told that the ending differs significantly from the movie.

I Wonder if V for Vendetta is this Weird...

Okay, I was prepared for the ending of Watchmen to be weird. I was expecting plot twists and unforeseen outcomes. But I was not expecting teleporting, exploding, psychic, pseudo-alien clones.

The fact that Veidt was behind everything the whole time was not terribly surprising. I mean, if I was the world's smartest man, I'd probably be arrogant enough to assume that nobody would be able to stop my elaborate plan in time. And I guess he was right. It's kind of strange to think that in this story the "heroes" fail and the "bad guy" wins. Of course, I think the characters of Watchmen defy such simple labels. At the crux of the issue is that annoying ethical dilemma: how do you justify killing millions of people, even if it means potentially saving billions more? Who deserves to be able to make those kinds of calls? Can one human being ever justify passing judgment over another, let alone millions? Suffice to say, the end of the story got really philosophical.

I think Watchmen really tries to make an an argument for a godless universe. At least, not the normal kind of gods that people might pray to in church. In this story, it is men who become gods--Ostermann because of a typical comic book superhero freak accident, and Veidt because he is the archetypal superman. Both men push mortal existence beyond its boundaries and are able to see the forces and machinations that slowly change humanity over the years. Both men are presented as having godlike physical and mental capabilities. However, an interesting dichotomy exists between them. Veidt is concerned with building a utopia, a heaven on Earth for the rest of humanity. His actions are ultimately guided by his ethical beliefs on what will bring about the greatest good for the greatest number. Dr. Manhattan, however, is isolated from the rest of humanity and does not share Veidt's interest in its future. He is the more god-like figure in that, to him, humans hold no more significance than the smallest ants or the rocks on Mars. Without any sentimental attachment to humanity, Dr. Manhattan is able to see the long term insignificance of Earth's fate and turns his attention to more interesting matters. If one views Dr. Manhattan as a deity figure in this story, then the narrative runs thus: Man creates God, who then in turn loses interest in Man and abandons him. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but the idea that the very gods we created have abandoned us seems central to Watchmen's story.

There is so much more to discuss about these later chapters, but it's already quite late and I'm sure we'll talk about more ideas in class. I've got to get more sleep.

Of Wikis and Watchmen

I haven't finished Watchmen yet, but I'm getting there. The story is definitely starting to pick up and get interesting, so I'm looking forward to the ending. I hadn't read any of Alan Moore's work before, but after taking this class, I can see why he's considered so influential. I've seen the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta movies, and my roommate tells me that there's one coming out for Watchmen. The LXG movie was pretty bad, but V for Vendetta was pretty well received because it was directed by the Wachowski brothers. My roommate seems to think that they picked a bad director to handle the Watchmen movie. Oh well. I guess not every superhero movie can be Batman Begins.

Speaking of Batman, I think my group's Wiki on the Batman comic series is done. Wow, what a clever segue, huh? Anyway, doing this project taught me a few things about making a Wiki. First, the best source of information...is usually Wikipedia, ironically. It's kind of hard to go out looking for other credible sources on the internet when everything is already neatly collected in one place for you. Luckily, my roommate has several Batman comics that he let me borrow, so I had an ace up my sleeve. Nothing like primary sources, after all. It was kind of nice that everything for the project is done online, though. We still met as a group to set things up and plan what we wanted to do, but other than that we were basically able to work on our respective sections separately.

My section was the characters page. I guess you could say I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. Most of the information wasn't too hard to fill out since I'm pretty familiar with the Batman universe. Or so I thought. Most of my knowledge comes from the movies and animated series. Turns out the comics are much different. And much weirder. They've got alternate universes, multiple origin stories for the same character, and all kinds of other crap. I basically did the best I could to focus on the canonically significant stuff. Even then, Batman has been around in comics from the '30s. The comics have racked up quite a cast of heroes and villains by now. There have also been many different writers and artists that have worked on Batman comics. It's interesting to see different creative minds re-imagine the Dark Knight. I think Batman also enjoys a better relationship between different mediums than do most comics. The Batman movies and T.V. shows have generally been pretty good, with the 1989 Tim Burton film and the recent Batman Begins helping to reignite public interest in the caped crusader.

I'll probably talk about the end of Watchmen in my next post, assuming it's not spoiled for me in class. Now that I've gotten my feet wet with Watchmen, I'm looking forward to V for Vendetta, especially since I've seen the movie. I'm anxious to see how the story and presentation differ between the comic and the film. Also, humor.

I'm going to start running out of worksafe stuff that is still funny to people who don't play way too many video games or read too many message boards, but I'll see what I can do.

So...goddamn...wet

I was walking back to my dorm from the undergrad library, with nothing but a leather jacket and an umbrella to protect me from the monsoon that just blew into town. I think I've had enough rain for the next few months now.

Chapter five makes a good point about the use of iconic facial expressions and whatnot in comics. When I first was exposed to Japanese comics and television shows, the characters used a bunch of expressions and animations that I hadn't seen before. Most of the stuff in this chapter was fairly obvious and covered information that even most casual readers of comics are probably already familiar with.

Chapter six presents the war between words and pictures in the history of western culture. McCloud once again brings back the infamous pyramid of which he is so fond in order to demonstrate how over the years, words and pictures have gradually drifted away from each other in their representation of art. However, McCloud argues that during the nineteenth century, new forms of art brought words and pictures closer to their original relationship before ultimately colliding in the form of comics. He makes a good point that there is a general disinterest in the public for "modern art", but I have to ask: Hasn't this always been the case? As much as the art snobs might deny it, a fundamental aspect to high art is its relative inaccessibility to the average Joe. The claim that our definition of great art hasn't changed much in the last 150 years also seems like an over-generalization. Of course, as an English major, I have to defend 20th century works like The Great Gatsby and "The Waste Land" as iconic representations of a distinct "modern" period of art. Anyway, aside from his understandably defensive attitude towards the legitimacy of comics as a form of art, McCloud is right about the fact that the medium of comics is ideal for storytelling due to its ability to narrate through both words and pictures.

I have to confess that I feel a bit overwhelmed by the comic book wiki project. It's due on Monday and I haven't even started on it. I have a bunch of papers and projects going on this week and next week for other classes and trying to juggle that with the everyday readings and assignments for all of them is keeping me occupied, to say the least. Reading Watchmen has been the closest thing that I've had to a break this week, so I was disappointed to find that we were reading McCloud for today instead. Oh well. In dark times like these, I can always turn to my humor folder to help preserve my sanity.

Watchmen

In one sense, Watchmen falls much more in line with what I'd have expected from a comic book than does Blankets. Costumed crime-fighters and animated violence are slightly more familiar territory for the medium than semi-autobiographical accounts of growing up in the Midwest. Nonetheless, Watchmen certainly does have unique elements to its story.

It took me a while to get a grasp on the world presented in the story. It's set in America in 1985 (with lots of flashbacks, of course), but it's not exactly the America that actually existed in 1985. Instead, it's a sort of alternate timeline with many similarities to, but also several key differences from, twentieth century events. The most immediately noticeable disparity exists in the form of the arrival of comic book-like heroes. They wear costumes and fight crime--pretty much the kind of stuff that you'd expect to see in a comic book. The main plot of Watchmen consists of the plight of various super heroes from the '30s to the '80s. The point of view often shifts from one character to another, but the common theme is that most of the characters are now retired crime-fighters.

However, there are other disparities between Watchmen's world and actual twentieth century events. World War II is still fought and won by the Allies, ultimately ending with dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. But years later in Vietnam, U.S. troops fight alongside super heroes like the Comedian and Dr. Manhattan and eventually claim victory over the Viet Cong. Dr. Manhattan's arrival also precipitates a number of incredible scientific breakthroughs, resulting in modes of transportation like the electric car and airship becoming commonplace. However, despite the altered outcome of the Vietnam war, President Kennedy is still assassinated and the Cold War is still very much a reality.

Considering that Watchmen was written in the eighties, I have to wonder what political relevance the story has some twenty years later. On one hand, many of the themes presented in the story--the Cold War and the Red Scare, the military industrial complex, and the United States' position as a world power--these ideas still have a powerful impact on contemporary politics and ideology. However, the world has changed a great deal since 1985, most notably with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It is with the privilege and comfort of hindsight that we now can look back on events such as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and see them as the last desperate acts of a dying super power. Ultimately, I think the effectiveness of Watchmen's narrative depends a great deal upon the reader's ability to comprehend the political tensions and uncertainty that dominated the Western world in the 1980s.

In other news, it looks like I'll be working on a Batman wiki for my first group project in English 300. I regret missing class that day and not being able to pick my own group, but at least the topic should be pretty interesting. I never really read the Batman comics, but I watched the movies and the shows, so it should be interesting to see the material on which they were based. I'll probably mention more about the project once I find out more information. In the meantime, here is another image that has been culled from my collection.

Bleh

I don't have nearly enough creative energy to come up with not one, but two unique titles for my posts every week.

Since I finished Blankets ahead of schedule and no new readings were assigned, I suppose I'll talk about the McCloud chapters that we read this week. I have to admit that I was disappointed when I found out that the subject of Chapter 3, "Blood in the Gutter", was not actually comic book violence. The brief depiction of the ax murderer slightly raised my hopes, but in vain. Oh well. The chapter was still fairly interesting, regardless. Creative use of the "gutter", or space in between panels, is an idea that had not occurred to me before reading this chapter. I'm used to reading the comics in the newspaper, where all of the different strips have so much allotted space and in large part just use three identically sized and equally spaced boxes to convey the action. However, in a larger magazine, or especially in a graphic novel such as Blankets, the artist has much more freedom with the layout of the pages and can do creative things with the panel size and shape.

I also found the bit about the different types of transitions to be interesting, if a little dry and scientific for the comic book medium. Some of the distinctions between the different transitions still seem a little arbitrary to me, but I think that McCloud does a good job of making something out of nothing with his research. The bar graphs make his points seem more credible because he can back up his claims with numbers and data. I wonder, though, if some of the claims made regarding the influence of Eastern art on Western art and vice versa are a bit outdated by now. It would be interesting to see now whether American graphic novels have taken more visual cues from Japanese manga, etc...

Chapter four does a good job of presenting and analyzing the challenges facing both the artist and the reader when attempting to convey time in comics. The passage of time in even the simple of scenes in comics is at best an estimation and at worst completely ambiguous. McCloud also makes a good point about the sequencing of panels. Sometimes I'm not sure which panel I'm supposed to look at next. There is no one perfect order that all artists and audiences are supposed to follow, as evidenced by the fact that most western comics tend to read left-to-right while their Japanese counterparts read right-to-left. Finally, I liked how McCloud broke down the various ways that artists have used to represent motion in comics over the years. Little motion blur lines are seldom thought of as distinctive elements of an artist's visual style, but McCloud proves that there is no simple way to show motion in a comic, giving rise to a variety of methods and styles that attempt to animate in an otherwise static medium.

In other news, I have added a list of links to the blogs of other members of the class, a blog roll, if you will. I cannot guarantee that every title is accurate or that every link works--these things have a habit of changing without notice and as I had to manually input the titles and links myself (is there a more automatic way?), they may be subject to human error. Nor can I guarantee that every person's blog is listed there. I counted, and I think I may have left a few out. If I neglected to list someone's blog it's either because I accidentally passed them over, or because I secretly hate them. Either way, really. I've also taken the liberty of sprucing the place up a bit, filling out juicy details in my profile and putting up a picture. Maybe someday soon I will work up the courage to venture forth and post comments on other people's blogs. Perhaps they will even reciprocate. For now I remain secure in the knowledge that the picture posted below is hilarious. If you fail to see the genius of these pictures, make sure that you actually click on them, as many of them will be animated. If they still fail to amuse you, then it's because you have no sense of humor.

So I finished Blankets...

...and I have to say that the final chapters were not exactly what I was expecting. I guess I'm used to novels and movies that feel compelled to end on a dramatic note--a wedding, a death, a battle. We all crave closure at the end of a story; we want to be able to read the final words of a book and know with certainty the fates of the relevant characters. Cliff-hangers are maddening. I wouldn't exactly accuse Blankets of such, but the ending does seem rather abrupt and not especially...well, conclusive. It makes enough sense, I suppose. I mean, this is supposed to be a portrayal of Craig's childhood and adolescence. In this sense, the story ending with him growing up and going off to college is to be expected.

However, Thompson is very selective with his presentation of the fates of the characters in the story. We learn that his brother gets married, for example, but we never hear a word about Raina or her family after Craig says his final goodbye to her. Given the first person narration, it makes sense that our knowledge of Raina ends when the protagonist is also cut off from her. But at the same time, one can't help but wonder what became of her. Thompson is careful to present to the reader a very dramatic and unstable family situation, but we never learn what happens with Raina's graduation, or her parent's divorce, or the tension between Ben and Raina's father. In this sense, the reader feels slighted by the hitherto reliable, if a bit sporadic, narration.

Similarly, I was surprised by the open-ended nature of Craig's fate. The last few chapters tell us how he grew closer to his brother, renounced Christianity, and broke up with Raina, but there's no clear ending note. I half-expected at least a few throwaway lines about how he graduated from college, found someone else, started working on graphic novels, etc...Instead, the story ends with him taking a walk in the snow which, while certainly in keeping with the meditative tone of the story, seems arbitrary. I don't need the words "THE END" stamped on the last page of every book I read, but I do like the sense of closure and reassurance that I get from a good, solid ending.

I'm supposed to have a roster of the blogs of the other members of the class, but after wrestling with things for a while, I've decided to attend to that at a later date. Maybe it would help if I didn't wait until 3 in the morning to write my posts. I'll get the hang of this blogging thing, yet. In the meantime, I leave you with a picture from my formidable humor folder. I believe you will find its grave and serious nature to be a welcome reprieve from the irreverent tone of my posts.

Blankets, Ch. 2-5

This is my second post and I'm still learning about this whole blogging thing, so these early posts are going to be pretty simple and more or less stick to the readings. Also, I feel I must apologize for the title of my blog. "John's Comical Blog" is at best a bad pun and at worst false advertising, as I fear that as of yet there is absolutely nothing of humorous value in my posts. So please forgive me for the title--it's still a work-in-progress.

After getting past my initial surprise at the presentation of Blankets, I was able to dive more into the plot and the characters in the next several chapters. What has struck me the most about the story thus far is the breadth of topics that it touches on. And, strangely, though my childhood experiences were very different from the protagonist's, I was amazed at the amount of the story that I felt I could relate to on a very personal level.

For one thing, I am also the older of two brothers. And Thompson's description of his interaction with his brother will almost certainly resonate with anyone who has a sibling, especially boys who have a younger brother. As an older brother, you feel at once both protective and dismissive of your younger brother. It is especially difficult to reconcile these conflicting feelings about your sibling when you yourself are still very young and immature. There were definitely times in my life when I found myself being cruel or disapproving to my brother without being able to justify my actions. Sometimes you just do things and afterwards wonder why it felt necessary to provoke someone that seems to look up to you. Every older sibling worries from time to time that he or she has done a poor job of protecting a younger sibling and the protagonist definitely seems to regret how he treated his brother as a child.

The setting of Blankets is the snow-strewn Midwest. I was born in Tennessee, but I've lived most of my life in Illinois, so I found myself relating to the narrator's experiences in Wisconsin and Michigan. Winter and snow are recurring themes throughout the story, and having lived in the Midwest really helps to imagine the setting. I have memories of playing in the snow with my brother and friends and going skiing. Hell, I still play out in the snow with my friends. I'm no huge fan of the cold, but if you live out here, you can't really get away from it, so you might as well make the best of it.

The other aspect of the story that I found myself identifying with was the idea of a long distance girlfriend. During my freshman year of high school, my family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma for my dad's job. We only spent a year there before moving back to Illinois, but at the end of the year, I asked a girl to the Freshman Spring Formal. We started talking over summer break during sophomore year, which eventually developed into a long distance relationship. My girlfriend came to visit me over winter break that year and it was just...weird. I mean, it was great to actually be able to spend time with the person that you've been talking to over the internet and the phone for the past year, but at the same time I think we both felt a lot of anxiety. I had to imagine what it must have been like for her, living in someone else's house, with someone else's family, without your own family there. And of course all of the tension and pressure that comes from having more or less unlimited access to each other. Even though you're careful to explain to the parents that there is a separate bedroom available for your guest, it's inevitable that both parties will end up spending their nights in the same room.

Like the protagonist, this was my first and only experience with having a girlfriend and it was hard trying to figure out how you're supposed to behave around each other when you haven't actually been around the other person the entire time. Suddenly spending an entire week living with someone that you haven't seen for over a year can be kind of awkward and I think Thompson really picks up on that in these chapters of Blankets. There is a constant tension between Craig and Raina where both of them seem unsure of their physical relationship. On one hand, they've been in correspondence for a long time and Raina's mother makes the comment that she could almost imagine the two of them being married. On the other hand, they've only physically been together for a matter of days and Craig seems reluctant to touch her. He seems uncomfortable around her, and yet at the same time he is incredibly satisfied just to watch her sleep. Thompson really captures the feelings of uncertainty and ecstasy that surround first love.

Inaugural Post

This will be the first post in this blog created for my English 300 class. I'm a bit behind with these initial posts, so I'll just get right to my thoughts on the readings.

Blankets is the first graphic novel that we're reading for this class and I have to admit that it's not what I expected. Of course, I really didn't know what to expect from this course. I was rather surprised when I walked into the class and was handed a pamphlet-like syllabus that told me I would need to read a comic book that explained...comic books. And I was even more surprised to learn that I would need to create a blog for the course. I've never had a blog before, so this whole experience has been somewhat unfamiliar to me.

But anyway, on to Blankets. I suppose what struck me first was the...rough, for lack of a better word, nature of the illustrations and text. I expected some sort of artsy, elegant illustrations with appropriately flowing text. I assumed that it would read something like the Dilbert or Calvin and Hobbes comics that I used to read: a predetermined number of more-or-less equally sized panels full of self-contained scenes. Instead, this book varies wildly in its presentational style. Virtually nothing is consistent between the pages.

For one, the size and shape of the panels is all over the place. Gone are the simple, square panels of the comics in newspapers. Some of the panels are large, some are small; some have strange and unusual shapes; some have unusual borders; some pages have a single panel with a caption underneath--some pages have no panels at all. There are times when the panels seem insufficient for the task of containing the action of the moment and the illustrations spill out over the edges of the box. The traditional "speech bubble" is also played with here. A character's words may begin in one panel and carry on for several more. At times there are illustrations within the speech or thought bubbles, and sometimes Thompson places small panels within larger ones.

The overall visual style of Blankets also surprised me. For such a serious work, it appears rather "cartoony" at first glance. However, as McCloud explains, the less realistic art style creates characters that require the reader to bring his or her own thoughts and experiences to them in order to fill them out. This helps the reader to identify with the characters on a more personal level. This art style also allows Thompson to incorporate more imagination into his work. There are occasional depictions of demons and other supernatural phenomena that a more realistic art style would probably struggle to represent. Blankets is as much about the author's feelings and innermost thoughts and imaginings as it is about the actual events of his life, so it's important that Thompson has access to some more abstract representations of reality.

Lastly, the appearance of the text surprised me. As I mentioned earlier, I'm used to reading comics with either very carefully penned handwriting, or more often, word processed type. The hand written style of the text here caught me off guard, but it matches the visual presentation of the art in the story very well. It also allows Thompson to do more creative things with the text. Beyond simply bolding, italicizing, underlining, or enlarging words to emphasize them, Thompson can change the entire style of the handwriting to match the scene. Narration and typical dialog may have a consistent, simple style of text, but more "active" panels feature text that seems more hastily and violently written. The words of an angry adult might be very large and jagged, whereas the words of a frightened child might be very small and wavy.

These are just the ideas that went through my head after having picked up the book for the first time. I'll address elements of plot and characterization in other posts.