Lit of Comics and Graphic Narrative

 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 p...

  For this week I read the first volume of the Phoenix series by Osamu Tezuka. I would say I read manga quite often but I realized I never sort of branched out in reading when it came to styles or more of the older works of the genre. Coming from a person who mostly indulges in standard weekly shounen stories, it isn’t to say I haven’t seen Tezuka’s style of art before. I recognize his influence on a lot of other major works in both manga and animation down the line, so I thought it would be interesting to see how this art style translated into telling a unique story. The Phoenix was quite a surprising read for me at first, and I think it grew on me the more I read. At first, I really didn’t know what type of story to expect, and the art style kept throwing me off just a bit because it really did remind me of light hearted cartoonish stories and funny comics. There were definitely some dark parts and twists that totally knocked me off guard, and it was especially interesting to se...

  For this week’s reading, I took a look at Valerian and Laureline volumes 2 and 3 by french comic duo Pierre Christin and  Jean-Claude. I had previously had some knowledge of this series because of the film adaptation which I was quite fond of. I had remembered that the original source materials came from french comics but I hadn’t had the time to read into it yet. What enthralled me most about this series in general was the classic sci-fi multi-dimensional world that the human characters had to navigate through. For this day and age, I guess it’s not that uncommon for themes/worlds like this to exist in the sci-fi genre, but I really appreciate the pathway that comics like these had influence over, especially for 1967. As an illustration/visual development major, perhaps I do hold a bit of bias for my love of the art style in particular as well. I absolutely love the graphic and crazy details in every panel, with each world/unique alien character having their own flair to t...