Graphic Literature

 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 really kept me guessing. One last thing I really enjoyed about this one was the little comic book cover type illustrations every once in a while to showcase some kind of classic horror poster. All of these aspects were wildly different from Bone, which I was a little bit familiar with previously because of its popularity within my middle and high school’s book fairs. The style and layout are extremely simple yet effective, which I think highlights that sometimes not everything has to be super detailed or complex to be popular, and that sometimes a simple story with fun characters can get you just as far. This of course gives off classic graphic novel vibes, and sometimes the pages reminded me of simple 4-panel funny comics from the newspaper. Seeing the shift from a similar style to a transformative into a whole graphic novel series is a wonderful example of how no matter the time really, we all still enjoy reading the same stuff. For my last contribution of thought, A Christmas Carol was pretty much what I expected it to be, to say the least. I did not think it was particularly good or bad in any way, but that’s possibly because I’ve already seen this story reinterpreted in various different ways over the years. From the first titular illustration though, I was almost a little disappointed with the strong comic/graphic approach to this one, just because I’m biased towards those classic vintage old painterly illustrations that give off a nice wintery Christmas time. 


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