Manga

I have read manga since I realized it existed. It started with Sailor Moon and Pokemon. That was how I first realized that manga was around. Little did I know how long it had been around and how many series there were out there. Once I found the manga section at Barnes and Nobles I started buying them and reading the series that I found interesting. Usually I read shounen or shojo mangas. I remember reading parts of the InuYasha series by Rumiko and I would pick up anything that Clamp had done. Piece by piece I gained over 200 volumes of manga. Now, with my family moving, they've got to figure out what to do with all the manga. And I still do read manga online. I wish I would have realized how many scanlation sites there were back when I bought all of that. It's much easier to read all of them online than to go out and spend all your money buying them.

So, though I don't read manga as much as I used to, I still do catch up on the ones that used to interest me. For instance, there is still one series that I buy in the store, which is Saiyuki by Minekura. I don't know what it is about that manga. I think it's just one that I will never get tired of. When you've stuck by a manga for 27 or so volumes, you want to stay caught up. Although the 27 volumes haven't been finished in the US, so that's why I keep up. For some reason, none of the scanlation sites really keep up with the newer volumes of Saiyuki. But I think one of the reasons that I stay dedicated to this manga is because you can see the development of Minekura's artistic style. Here's a scan of the first volume, and here's one of her newest updates. There is such a difference in style, and I love looking back at it and seeing the differences. Sure, it was the story that interested me at first, not the art. But I still love looking back and seeing the development.

There's another manga that I actually just read over the weekend. "Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle" by Clamp. I've been reading it for a while now, since it was first released in English in 2004. I owned the first few volumes, but the rest I read online because they've been keeping up with the scanlations as they're released in Japan. Over the past few days I had the chance to read up on the chapters I hadn't read before. Which also brought me to the end of the series. It was completed just recently. And I've got to say... I wasn't a big fan of Tsubasa. It was all very, very confusing. If I tried to explain what had happened, I couldn't. There was too much going on and it kept going in circles and circles. And as for the style of art, well.. I've always adored Clamp's art, but this one was different. It wasn't the art that bothered me, but the toning. They had very messy toning that made it hard to tell what was going on. Here is an example. Their line art would be fine, but they add in this gritty toning and swirly energy waves everywhere. It just makes things even more confusing. I stuck with the story in hopes that I would understand what was going on eventually. But even after it's ending, I don't.

When it comes down to it, I won't stop reading manga. Or things like manga. I've sort of moved on to webcomics, but they're like the scanlations of manga I've read anyway. So it's not going far from my roots in manga.

Stereotypes

Stereotypes have always interested me. I just don't understand what people come up with for their images. And the lack of observation is why. Or for the ones that do use observation, they can still choose to depict them in unnatural ways. It's engrossing to see the work that people can come up with depicting stereotypes or working with them in a number of ways. People can just not think about what their doing and just follow the stereotypes that were handed down to them, or they can use it for a number of other reasons. They could follow the stereotypes to make a point. To make a social commentary. Stereotypes are used so commonly for social commentary. For myself, for my illustration media class, we have to find a black and white image of a face and we can add a caricature to it. I found an image of Michael Jackson when he was in the Jackson 5. I sat down with my sketchbook and started to figure out how to make it over exaggerated for a caricature. I chose to make his afro incredibly large. And as to be expected, I exaggerated his nose as well. (Since he had one back then). Part of me, while I was drawing this, was wondering if I was doing something that was too stereotypical. People tend to overexaggerate hair and nose for African Americans. Their teeth as well. Take Fat Albert for an example. We watched it today in class. A lot of them had afros. Pretty much all of them had huge teeth. It just fits the stereotype for African Americans.

Women and men are stereotyped all the time. And it's pretty much always the men that do it. Their depictions of women will have large chests, thin waist, wide hips and skinny legs. They basically always have long hair, large lips and the women are always looking as sexual as possible. Take the Bond movies for example. Has there ever been a voluptuous woman as his leading lady? How about men. Has there ever been an average looking James Bond? Men can be just as stereotyped as women. Although I do think that the women stereotypes happen more often. It's all thanks to the standards of beauty.

A reference that I just found the other day was on the website called Dump.com. One of the images has cartoon character versions of popular websites. It includes facebook, myspace, twitter, wikipedia, deviantart, youtube and google. Here is the link for the image. It's not only people that can be represented in stereotypes. Even websites can be represented in such a way. And it works. You can see by looking at that image that it's stereotyping the connotations and feel of the websites.

Over the weekend, I read "The Golem's Mighty Swing" by James Sturm. I actually quite enjoyed the comic. I've always found antisemitism to be a topic that I want to know about. The comic focused a lot on that. The part that stood out the most to me was during their games later, when they have Hershl as the Golem. The Golem is used to get more people showing up to their games. But people aren't coming to watch the game. They're coming to see the Jews. For example, the crowd throws rocks at the manager's younger brother, Mo. They're trying to knock his hat off so they can see his horns. The whole 'Jews have horns' idea is just funny to me. We talked about it in a past English class in high school when we were reading Dante's "Inferno". My teacher told us about how there was a mis-translation in the past where Moses had horns when the translation was really supposed to be translated into "a ray of light". So I find it funny when people think that Jews have horns because of it.

Stereotypes will never go away. They've been around forever and I don't believe that they will ever dissipate.

Barefoot Maus

Well. That is not exactly my ideal way to wake up in the morning. "Barefoot Gen" is so depressing. Every time something happy happens, you know something bad is just around the corner. Once the boys got the money they wanted... I knew something was going to happen. Once they bought the milk, I thought to myself "...The baby's going to be dead." And of course, it was. It was a general movie at first. It just seemed to be in the style of generic anime, but the topics were much more serious than most animes I've viewed in my life. It was interesting to think about. I remember learning about Hiroshima and Nagasaki when I took a history class and it made enough of an impact on my mind to be able to remember it so well. But seeing it, even through an anime, made more of an impact. Just because it's in an anime, doesn't mean that it didn't get the impact it was supposed to.

As for "Maus", another way of impacting people through animals and graphic novel. Some people might think that it's meant to humor the readers a little, but I don't think it does. I think that the choice of animals makes it all the more interesting. I question the choices that were made. The Jews were represented by mice. Is it because of the animal in general? Mice to many are just annoying rodents that no one cares for. Vermin. Did Spiegelman do it on purpose? I'm assuming so. It's depressing to think about how the jews were seen like vermin to the leaders of the Holocaust. Spiegelman's father was the center of the graphic novel. It must have been hard on him to reflect back on the things that he had gone through. Reflecting back on the bad things that you've gone through can never be a fun thing to do.

Honestly, I'm not sure if I want to ever read that again. It was enough the first time around. I think it's personally one of the graphic novels that you only have to read once to make an impact on you. It's not like Shaun Tan's "Arrival". It's not something that has some attractive form that makes you want to go back to it. It's not a pleasant story. Nowhere in the story do I think "Yes! I love that!" How could you love "Maus"? It's very well done and gives you a glance into the eyes of someone who went through hell. Even through the form of a mouse. Besides, there are a lot of people out there who love animals. For example, you might watch a movie and with humans dying in it, you pay little attention. But they kill a dog and you're sad. I'm an example of that. In "I Am Legend" I cried when Will Smith had to kill his dog. I'm more sympathetic to animals than humans in fictional things. And "Maus" isn't really fictional. It's just the way that it's represented. You might be more upset if you see a mouse getting tortured than a human. Now that's not necessarily how all people feel, that's just my view personally. I might connect more. But another reason is that he needed a new way to depict the Holocaust. The story has been told over and over again. But has anyone told it through a mouse's point of view before? No. Curiosity ensues.

Something else I enjoyed was how the mice were all represented as the same form. They all looked the same, but there was a change of clothing. That was the only way you could tell them apart. It was a clever way of getting through that. One could say that the choice was to unite the Jews in general. Or their could be the fact that the Germans saw the Jews as all the same. Their individualism didn't matter. No matter what they looked like, it made no difference. They still died. So I find it fitting that the mice all basically looked the same, other than their clothing.

"Barefoot Gen" and "Maus" relate to each other in many ways. They are both stories of the second world war, although on the opposite sides. Depicted in different ways, both "Barefoot Gen" and "Maus" are more about suffering and the nature of war. There are always struggles with power. Someone wants control and fighting ensues. Peace is harder to achieve than war.

The Beatles and Underground Comics

The Beatles "Yellow Submarine" is amazing. I've seen it a few times in the past, but no matter how many times I watch it, I love it. It hurst my eyes actually whenever I watch it. It's rather unpleasant in a very good way, I think. If that makes sense. All the colors, styles and patterns used are all conflicting. But that was the purpose of the movie. That was the look they wanted. I would have loved to listen in on the production of this movie. Hearing them discuss their plans for the movie would have been so funny. I can just imagine them throwing out the idea of the Blue Meanie and shoes with wings bouncing up and down. Something about it just always interests me to watch though. It's just so... Different. Different than anything else I've ever watched before. Still to this day I've never seen anything that was even similar to The Yellow Submarine. And maybe that's just because I haven't really seen many movies from the late sixties. Still, The Yellow Submarine will always be something that stands out in my mind. My eyes are still trying to adjust after seeing all of that.

As for Underground Comics... I don't even know where to start with this topic. There is just so much to discuss. It's something I haven't really read any of before. I read some of Mr. Natural by Robert Crumb, but that's the only involvement I've had in underground comics. For today, I picked a random comic without looking in the bin and I ended up pulling out "Gay Comix", published in 1980. It's got several different stories done by several different artists. The stories are about different men and women in gay situations. The first story, for example, is about a woman who was married. She and her husband grew tired of each other and he left her. She started trying to date, deciding she was bisexual. She goes through a lot of people who leave her, until she finds one woman and tries to be less uptight and tells the woman that she loves her. The comic ends with them together. I think out of all the comics in it, my favorite is the back cover. On the back, there are two men roller skating and holding each other. Then there are two women and their daughter with her dog. The daughter coms up to her and says "Mommy.. Rusty an' I just saw a man an' a woman doin' something strange in the bushes!" I find that entertaining. How the girl doesn't understand why the man and woman are together. At the bottom of the page, Roberta Gregory - the artist - wrote "Here's to a gay new decade!". So from what I can tell, she wanted people to be more open to gay sexuality. Based off of the comic, she wants the new decade to be more open and hopes that homosexuality will be a huge thing. I have to say that I rather enjoyed reading the comic. It was fun. Underground comics are definitely something that I have more interest in now that I know about them.

Cartoonist Track - Mr. Natural

So here's my attempt at making a comic that relates to Crumb's "Mr. Natural". Initially I started out trying to draw characters in a similar style to how he does it. Mostly simplistic with line work. He has variation in line from the main outline to details throughout the page. I came up with two characters, one asking the other about his life. I tried to in a way parallel Mr. Natural and Flakey Foont. In one comic I read, "Mr. Natural & Flakey Foont Thinkin' About Death 'N' Stuff", Flakey tries to talk seriously to Mr. Natural, but Mr. Natural just sort of gives him short answers. It seems he's just humoring him. So I tried to give my comic a feel like that. Where one character is trying to talk seriously, but the second just has fun. I didn't try to do backgrounds like Crumb, however. He has a much more linear way of working backgrounds with line work and detail. I wanted to change that just a little to add my own style to it.

Contract With God

I read Will Eisner's 'Contract With God' and I've got to say that it was definitely something that made me grin as I read. I couldn't help it. All the irony added into the graphic novel was just simply entertaining. The man makes a contract with god as a child going to America. He makes a life for himself, in charge of a synagog and a child placed at his door. As he grows up, his child passes away and he finds that God broke his contract. So he 'argues' with god and throws the contract written on a rock out the window. He starts becoming a business man, buying and selling property with the deeds of the synagog. Eventually, he asks the rabbis to make him a new contract with god. Thinking he's a good man, they agree and write him up a new contract. He dies shortly after and a child outside finds his contract that he had thrown away so many years ago. The child signs the contract himself.

Everything that was written I could see coming. It was an obvious thing. I think I just personally search for ironic situations in stories. So it made sense to me that everything that happened went as it did. As for Eisner himself, I think I greatly enjoy his sense of humor in his writing. It's almost tragic all the things that he puts this man through, but by the end, you just can't help thinking 'he deserved it.' Not at the beginning. It didn't seem like his daughter deserved to die. But once he grew up and started abusing his power, it just made sense that he would die. It was something I knew would happen to him. With the attitude the main character portrayed, it seemed fitting that god would be vengeful towards him.

One thing that really interested me was how the words on the page became an art form in themselves. They could become different artistic forms that worked with the page more than a simple speech bubble with words in it. I remember on one particular page, the words formed into rain drops. It just seemed that they interacted more with the pages than usual comics that I'm used to reading. It gave off more of a mood than most words usually do. Eisner knew what he was doing and clearly was an excellent story teller and artist.

Carl Barks, Tintin and Betty Boop

What can I say about those three subjects? They're all interesting in a variety of ways. To the point where I'm not even sure where to begin. I'll start with Betty Boop. When I was young, I had a Betty Boop doll that I would carry around with me everywhere. I think I actually watched some of the animations. I must have since I was such a big fan of her. But as usual, I never noticed all of what was going on when I was that age. Now that we've rewatched some of it, I've got to say one thing: Wow. Betty Boop is very dark! I never noticed it before. It's definitely more mature than I thought it was. For one thing, the song that the ghost sings to her. "Minnie the Moocher." I've heard that song in multiple places. While with Oingo Boingo, Danny Elfman uses it in "The Forbidden Zone". During that time, he is playing Satan and sings that song. The film was in 1980 although I didn't discover that the movie even existed until my roommate watched it a week ago. Where I'd heard the song the first time was in Family Guy's "Blue Harvest", their spoof on Star Wars. As Peter (as Han Solo) and Chris (as Luke) try to sneak onto the death star. It's amazing how much one song and reference can get around. I owe it to Betty Boop for bringing it up again so I could research it out of my curiosity.

Just like Betty Boop, I knew about Carl Barks when I was younger too. I was a huge Disney fan and Donald Duck was great. I read a story that was composed of eight pages called "Gyro Gearloose in Grandma's Present". It's about Gyro, and inventor. He goes to 'grandma's' farm to board for the Christmas vacation, hoping to get away from inventing. But in the end he creates a machine that can use dirt to produce anything on the farm. So nothing would be needed. No use for pigs, cows, anything. It was pretty interesting. I'd seen him in the old television shows and decided to read about him. It was pretty interesting to read. I noticed that the color palet was rather limited. Every single panel on all eight pages had a blue background. Whether it was sky or a wall, it was blue. And the ground was always white or yellow. If it's inside, the color is white. If outside, it's yellow. It was printed in 1956, so it's not a surprise that the color palette is minimal. It seems like that comic is generated to a much younger audience. It has easier concepts to grasp.

Then look at "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets". Children would not be the general audience for that. They could read it, but they probably wouldn't understand it. Unless you were actually in the time when Tintin was printed, because then the Soviet Union would be a current issue for you. But by the time I would have read this as a kid, I wouldn't have understood it. The comic is set up by Tintin trying to get to Moscow. But the Soviet police keep trying to stop him. He's put in jail, a torture chamber and more. Each time, he escapes and runs away. He puts on a number of disguises and gets hurt quite a few times. He gets in a car crash, he gets beaten up, and yet he always seems perfectly fine just in time for the next accident. He finds stolen goods that Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky had been gaining and tries to get back to Berlin to let the press know. The secret police still tries to stop him before he can get it out, but he manages to get back to Berlin. It's definitely something I wouldn't understand if I had read this before. And I have read it before too. When I was a student ambassador in France in 2005, I stayed with this family for three days and they had Tintin's comics in their house so I read them. And I wasn't fluent in French, but I knew enough to understand the gist of what was going on. I'm not sure which one I read, but I think it might have been Tintin in Thailand. But overall I find the comic a very interesting read.

It's amazing how each time I read a comic in this class, I understand it more than I ever could have when I read it previously. It seems like all comics are much more mature and sophisticated than I noticed.