Death Note

My favorite part of Death Note was definitely the character design for the Shinigami, and really the art in general. This was my first Manga and it had a very different feel than other comics I've read.

In class Stephen mentioned that the production process of mangas was different than that of comics. The bubbles are drawn by the artist and incorporated into the art, rather than being added later by a letterer. I thought that had a nice feel to it.


I really enjoyed the art but the story opened too fast. The whole thing really moves like a 14 year old boy wrote it, and I think that is probably the audience. At the beginning of the story the character finds a book, and almost immediately decides he is going to kill all the murderers in the world. This decision comes fast, and while the character does display some doubt, it seemed a stretch that a kid that is already too caught up in his own concepts of good and bad, would be able to kill so many people in such a short time.

Beasts of Burden

So... I definitely can't say I've ever read anything like Beasts of Burden... and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it.
There is something very old fashioned with the art, the water color... and the fact that the characters are all animals compared to the violent and magic lending undertones of the piece...


I think that's why I like it... The combination of sincerity and insincerity reminds me of vulgar cross stitching....

The series is written in a sort of Strange Tales way, and while there is a narrative that follows from one issue to the next, the succession of issues almost feels like a new episode.


I don't really know what to think about the story... the only criticism I'd have is that in Volume 4 some of the action is unclear....

Neil Gaiman New Yorker Article

It was interesting to read Neil Gaiman's biography in the New Yorker. Gaiman is definitely a man who has his hands in every form of media; film, comics, blogs, books... which leaves me wondering more whether or not specific ideas and stories operate better in one media or another, or if it truly is all about execution. There were times I was reading Sandman that I believed it could not be a book, because I was not too attached to the details of the event, and was not given much character insight, or anything that would have left me interested enough in to learn any way that wasn't a quick glance at the page.

The quotes from Gaiman in the article did not help me get a better idea of who he was. I really like his thoughts, they're very clever one-liners, I like the genera he writes in, the macabre Victorian period he draws from and the mythical lore he incorporates. But so far I've only read Sandman and wasn't particularly in love with it.

The most fascinating part of the article was hearing about how Gaiman learned to write comic scripts from Allen Moore. I wonder how that opportunity came about and how long it took to go through the script.


I wonder how he pitched his renovated concept for the Sandman.

Sandman Dream Country

Neil Gaiman's Sandman Dream Country is an interesting approach to a comic book. It takes a theme: dreams and dream lords, and explores it through an almost scholarly narrative. Perhaps its just because I read it before finals week, but it seemed too close to an essay for me to really enjoy.

The first story was about an author who receives a muse from another author who previously tricked her into being his slave. The most interesting parts of this short story was the mythology. Had this not been a comic book, and just been a short story, I wouldn't have finished it. The art was interesting enough for me to stick with it. I would have been more interested if the story had more mythology and was less on the life of writer. The main character of the story, a writer, doesn't show any real guilt about raping and imprisoning the muse. There is no interesting conflict with his relationship to the muse. When the lord of dreams attacks the writer I didn't feel any remorse for the main character as he went insane.
 His going insane was my favorite part of the books, but not favorite enough to justify reading the whole story.

The next chapters were about cats, Shakespeare's midsummer night dream and a woman who looses her face because of the Egyptian dream lord.

Again there were moments in each story that were good:
Vultures from the cat story and the reactions of the demons to Midsummer's Night Dream.

My favorite story was the last one, the euthanasia debate is interesting and seems to have been surfacing a lot lately. 
Friday NYU showed the first year graduate students of 2010's films. One of the documentaries showed a 92 year old woman in Switzerland who wanted to receive Euthanasia but couldn't because the Swiss government did not have sufficient proof that she was going to die soon.

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life

I was initially turned off from the cover art and the movie, but I really enjoyed the first issue.

The comics moved at a great pace, I was interested in the characters (although it took me a while to notice the difference between some of them... dashes vs dots on cheeks) and its definitely a book where you get out of it what you give. The art style is simple enough that you can easily skim through and understand the story, but the panels are loaded with details such as labels on shirts and hats.

I don't have a whole lot to say about this other than that I like it, and I just bought the rest of the series.

The Arrival

Its clear that Shaun Tan put a lot of thought into The Arrival's universe. The creatures, technology and environment are all incredible, and Tan takes a lot of time exploring both the environment, and his characters. If the world and the characters were not this strong there is no way I would have sat through this story. Its a strong choice to tell the main characters story, which is immigrating, then waiting for his family to be reunited in the new land for 3 of the 4 chapters. Allowing the main character to explore the world while he waits allows us to understand both the foreign environment, where other characters in the new environment come into play, and the time spent waiting, (because even though there are no words, it is an agonizing wait.)

I would rather have explored and learned more about the world Tan created through actions and conflict, rather than following a character waiting, wandering, getting set up in his new apartment.

The style of drawing and page layouts, with the waiting of the story makes it more exhausting. I like that the drawings are like photos from the 1800's, but would again, like them with a less waiting story.

(Sorry this scan is horrible.) This page illustrates a few different interesting deliberate choices.
The first being the use of blurry images (not so much on this page, the blurs are more accented later on, chapter II I believe, as the main character wakes up to his cat like guppy creature telling him something) to indicate the state of characters weakness.
Another is the use of angles, when looking at the dad in the final panel the girl is looking up at him in a low angle shot. This choice is very dramatic and not totally maintained through the rest of the page. Maybe it is only used this once, at the end of the page, as a punch line?
It is also interesting that the POV is not the main character. The whole piece feels like memories (everything drawn like a photo album) maybe the character we are following is not the main, and the little girl is. I don't know.
This page doesn't capture it as well as the first page, where there is a series where the father is packing up his suit case, but another trait of this piece is how slow it does. Which on the one hand captures the moments extremely well, and makes us aware of how slow waiting is. On the other hand, its a little painful.

I just got out of a storyboarding class where I showed my professor my boards and he brought up an interesting point about the movement in a page. I hadn't ever thought about composition in his terms, but he brought up that the moment from one page, through shapes and lines, will help lead our eyes from one panel to the other, and started showing me how. I marked this page before class today, because it was a little disorienting, or strange that we move from the man walking in one direction to a 180 degree flip where he is moving in the other, towards the back corner of the page (again not a good copy). But after the class maybe it makes sense with the movement of the guppy cat. I don't know, I'm still trying to figure this one out, for some reason this page disorients me/stands out to me.

BONE

 I remember first picking up Bone in '97 (I know because my Aunt sent it to me with a pack of the trading cards and a calendar from that year) and reading the over-sized comic with my dad. It was the only book I owned that wouldn't fit on the shelf, we had to keep it next to the atlas. We read up to The Dragon Slayer, which was all that was out at the time, but that's as far as we got. A few years back I tried to find my old copies of the book, but it seems my mothers favorite slogan "if in doubt throw it out" finally related itself to something other than lettuce. It was great to finally be able to pick up the series again, I read the series in 2 days.

The art, characters, conversation and the structure are incredible. I really enjoyed it.
pg 249 Art of carrying on a conversation and the stupid rat creature on the left always brings up quiche... again happens on 484, quiche rat is on left

pg 258 it disquieted me that he went on watch and wrote a letter, the way this was inserted was strange but i'm not so sure its a good point.

pg 283 i like how the background functions to portray the mod, and how the dream panels are all the same horizontal shapes.


pg 334 interesting dramatic motivation, but not totally logical, don't understand why, if Grandma Ben was going to walk off, she would have announced herself by opening the door. but still fun

pg387 grandma ben looks like joan of arc.

pg 497, the way the villagers have changed the log into a wall is very Zelda-y actually all of the villager mentality that we overhear feels like walking around Zelda. Also, apparently Zelda is a recognized proper noun in spell check.

pg 754 and 755 i like how the two actions are proceeding in different directions, that plus the rain makes it feel even further out.

pg 916 i like how the scythe is given a back story.  Instead of making it just the Grim Reaper icon... or at least to transcend it.

I love the series
Made me cry
I like that the belief system of the bones is more modern and fits us even though we can physically relate to the image of the valley dwellers. Although in Scott McCloud's comics he mentioned that we can more redily relate to more abstracted figures.

I love Bartleby and the Red Dragon.



Points: page155 Tom Looks a little like Rasl