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.