Lit of Comics and Graphic Narrative

  For this week’s reading, I read a bit of Octopus Pie. In terms of every media we’ve read so far this semester I think I’m most familiar with webcomics, so reading a story like this was very fun. Being so intertwined in the age of digital comics and fast story-telling, I thought Octopus Pie was a nice relatable story compared to all the high action fantasy stories I’m used to seeing in webcomics. The small stories between tackling day to day roommate life, friends, relationships, and minimum wage jobs were interesting despite most of these particular themes being quite common in the medium. The art style and story really reminded me of Scott Pilgrim and the Owl House, which share similar themes and also help to prove the idea that perhaps stories like these really are elevated in this style. The cartoonish expressions and over-exaggerated actions give a little excitement to these day to day dilemmas despite a lot of other comics media also dealing with real-life situations. There’s s

  For this route, I wanted to create a short and simple story of a hungry girl, with art loosely based on my own apartment with a little added flair. This style was heavily inspired by Q Hayashida’s art, most notably her approach to linework in her series Dorohedoro. I have just recently been observing many horror-themed types of art, and am always interested in how different artists illustrate sort of darker themes. In Hayashida’s case, a wide range of her illustrations are crowded, detailed, and super loose. From a distance, there is always so much to look at that it sometimes seems overwhelming, but when you zoom in it’s not hard to notice how incredibly sketchy the linework actually is, which I thought was pretty interesting. Most of the “horror” aspect I can see comes from a lot of this messiness, with body horror and bloody often being portrayed as messy and chaotic. I really wanted to capture this sense of chaos even within a panel that has no big action in it, so a lot of my l

  This week I chose to read a few volumes of Black Panther by Christopher Priest. Like the Batman comics, I had very little prior exposure to many Black Panther comics beyond the general MCU adaptation. Overall, it was pretty much what I expected from a superhero comic, with lots of familiar and captivating characters along with a solid storyline of lore and politics in the world. I recognized some changes that they made regarding the film, which I think makes the comics version of T’Challa all the more unique. From an artist's perspective, it was very fun to see how Priest illustrated his version with such glowing color effects and bold expressions, it was almost as if each panel could be a spotlight cover in its own right. I also enjoyed a lot of small humor splashed in between, which I see a lot of the MCU films tend to incorporate in their scripts as well (though in my opinion sometimes I do feel like these moments play out better in comic panel form). Jumping from Batman to t

  1. What is your reaction to the text you just read? I haven’t read that many Batman comics in my time, but I think this was a wonderful example to start off with. I think the writer did an excellent job portraying the dark tone of the characters, showing that the theme of Batman is not always that of your shiny heroic superhero story. My expectations really shifted in the middle of the story, where they didn’t hold back in displaying exactly how nasty the Joker could be. It’s writing on idealistic society and human morals were also very interesting to read about because I think it breaks the assumption that every superhero story should simply have a right and wrong side. While I by no means agree with the Joker’s actions, I can sort of see what his reasoning is for falling down into a state of madness. The corresponding artwork was enticing as well, which I thought was cohesive, detailed, and downright scary to look at at some points.  2. What connections did you make with the stor

  For this week I chose to read One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry. I might be embarrassed to say I initially clicked on it based on the title alone, but I was actually pleasantly surprised by what I got, and I surely don’t regret reading this at all. The art style was an instant intriguing factor, with each page put together like a scrapbook making the theme of growing up and experiencing all sorts of problems for the first time very realistic. What really interested me was how each demon was presented as something pretty singular, yet with each story, it seemed to become a much bigger problem than what was first introduced. As I read on I also noticed how the problems definitely became deeper and (to me at least) more profound and universal in their nature and probably just how the author wrote them. Even when using the small paneling style, I thought the narrator’s thoughts and doubts were summed up and described perfectly for the overwhelming feelings of growing up. A lot of the pro

 My Favorite Thing is Monsters (4 points) Bone Vol 1 (1 point) CL Berkley A Christmas Carol (1 point) For this week’s reading, I looked a bit at My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Bone, and A Christmas Carol. It was interesting to read all three of these works together because although they were technically all comics, they were vastly different from each other which I think really illustrates how much range and creativity artists have taken into account when creating comics, especially with the changing times. My first impressions of My Favorite Thing is Monsters was definitely the art style and medium, with a sporadic collection of pen drawings on loose-leaf paper covering each page. Ranging from full solo illustrations to sometimes more story type comic layouts, I would categorize this as more of an alternative comic. I thought that sometimes the amount of text really distracted me at times, and on some pages, the author even chose to change the rotation of text so I guess every page