Comics as Contemporary Literature

This week I read Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, One Bad Rat, and Bone. Jimmy Corrigan had me blind sided when I went in not knowing what to expect. From the cover, it looked like a kid’s comic book that would be on the shelf at a scholastic book fair in grade school, but then Jimmy, the main character, was swearing at his mother, there were depictions of suicide, and it followed a dark path down Jimmy’s life. It’s a non-linear story, but it packs a lot and is almost biographical as we unveil pieces of Jimmy’s life. One Bat Rat was my favorite of the three. I grew attached to the main character Helen and I the way her past is revealed to us is very creative. I may be biased because I’m a big Beatrix Potter fan too. The book Helen “found” in the wall at the end made me smile. I’m glad she was able to overcome her trauma and come out happy in the end. One Bad Rat follows a nonlinear timeline too, and it is literary. It clearly tells a story and the character arcs. Were it a book, the Beatrix Potter bit at the end would not have had the same effect in my opinion. I think it adds to my reasoning of why comics should be included as literary works. It meets the same goal, but some stories benefit from being “shown” to their audience differently. Finally Bone seemed like a very typical story line. I remember this one from the scholastic book fairs. It’s pretty much a YA or kids novel, just drawn out. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the last two comics, but it was entertaining.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Future of Comics

This week I read 17776 or What Football Will Look Like in The Future and Trash Mountain. Both works use multimedia, and it makes for the most interesting comic reading experience I've had. What Football Will Look Like in The Future had some youtube videos in some parts and used a calendar to show the passage of time in the beginning. Video format is something I’ve never seen used in comics before, even on the web, so this was new. Trash Mountain was especially interesting. It used music and animation along with it’s drawn panels. Some of the art looked multimedia too, like things made of clay and 3D models. Another interesting aspect to point out about Trash Mountain was it’s lack of dialogue or any words for that matter. It circles back to our first day of class reading The Arrival and how comics can tell stories just with sequential pictures and how visuals can go beyond needing words to explain. Trash Mountain read clearly and I could make out the story about a man finding oth
Read more

Wide World of Comics - Blacksad

This week I read the first issue of Blacksad. I didn’t expect to like it much, but it was good. I’m always up for a good detective story, I might read more when I have more time in the summer. My only issue with it was the whole using sexy pin-up girls for the lead female characters. It was especially weird with everyone being animals, but the female counterparts may as well be human. If I didn’t read that Blacksad was a foreign comic first published in France I would have thought it was an American comic. It’s the same format and the art style isn’t much different from American comics. It's also set in the US even.  The other graphic novel we discussed reading was Persolpis. I only read a little of the graphic novel, but I watched the animated movie. I think the fact that Persepolis has reached such a large audience is great.  I appreciate learning about the Iranian Revolution from someone who experienced it. Persepolis also stands as a work that may squash some false percep
Read more

The Arrival

The Arrival does a great job of telling a story without using words. For starters, all the images are in a clear sequential order, like the most important snapshot frames of a film were taken out to show direction and context. To compare this to something familiar to my major, it’s the same rule to storyboarding. What we draw should be necessary to tell the story and should be drawn clearly to understand the image. Each image in The Arrival clearly shows what is going on in the narrative, for example, who the main character is and what his goals are. He is the character because we see in almost every panel and and we start and end with his goal. We see that he has a family and he leaves them to find a way to give them a better life as he searches for work in an unfamiliar land. One aspect of the story that may be considered a challenge is showing what new things are without explaining them in words. The world that The Arrival takes place in is nothing like our own, however the artist u
Read more