Week 5: Eisner and Thompson

-
For this week’s readings I took Eisner's Dropsie Avenue and compared it to Thompson's Blankets and Doot Doot Garden. I ended up reading them and the flipping to and from each to compare them style-wise. I think what caught my attention most was the dynamic use of positive and negative spacing with the black and white. In both comics there was a lot of the same hatching style and really cool use of the negative spaces to either put text on or just to emphasize a particular scene. 
            I noticed that in Dropsie Avenue there was a lot of play with not having boarders for panels and it was more implied rather than constrained by an outline of the image of a particular scene. I think it was really clever to do the comics in this way because it was different than the others I had seen when comparing the two works. With Blankets it was mostly outlined but sometimes the negative space would create its own boarder and then fade out to no boarder around a blank, white area. 

            With both sets of comics, I think both Eisner and Thompson did a nice job at dealing with heavy themes like prostitution, abuse, murder, marital issues, the list goes on. I felt like a lot of the scenes were pretty raw but then there would be little things that brought back the lightheartedness like the man paying a guy to make it seem like he turned into a dog to get out of his bad marriage and the kids having a little pretend race underneath the covers in order to get warmer because it was so cold in the house. 

            I ended up reading Doot Doot Garden just for fun and I’m glad that I did because it was pretty funny in some parts. Some parts were kind of gross like eating poop and diarrhea puddles getting your shoes all soaked but it made me laugh nonetheless and it was interesting to see the difference between Blankets and Doot Doot Garden with the time difference in which they were creating in. I thought it was funny that there was like a patch of text explaining that it was intended to be 100% written and drawn in 24 hours but that shit came up, as it does, so it was finished the following Wednesday but it’s still impressive in my opinion.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 6: Underground Comics

-
Oh boy, where to begin with this blog post. The underground comics are certainly something. I think I read the most out of the Tits and Clits comics because I thought it’d be pretty funny and I think it was. When it comes to crude things people can either be uncomfortable or find it amusing or maybe a mix of both?              I thought it was funny how extreme some bits of the comics got like the dildo covers for each type of woman out there because I think there are real things out in the world that people buy that are wild and most people would think do people actually use that?! Or like you’ll see this crazy ad saying its like a cooking gadget but really it’s a sexual device of some sort. It just reminded me of things like that and it made me laugh a bit.             I did find it interesting thought that throughout the comic there were quite a few differ...
Read more

Week 12: Comics by Women

-
For this week's blog post, I read some of the "She-Hulk" comics along with some of the comics we were reading from in class but for this post, I'll be focusing more on the "She-Hulk" comics. I want to focus more on these because I can compare them to man-made comics that star women heroes. The biggest difference you can immediately notice is the style and body proportions. In most comics with just well any woman in it really, you'd see super unrealistic body proportions. You know which ones I'm talking about. The tiny tiny waist, the giant boobs, the similar facial features to all other women heroes in comics, and the lack of variety of shapes and sizes within the comics in general. Yes, in this comic She-Hulk does have fairly big boobs but the difference here was that they were more natural in shape AND you couldn't see her nipples 24/7 and they didn't look like they could stab your eye out because in men's comics those ones are clearly...
Read more

The Arrival

-
I actually really enjoyed reading the comic of "The Arrival" by Shaun Tan. At a first glance I was a little apprehensive just because there were so many pages but as soon as I got into it I was hooked. I didn't mind how many pages there were because the story was intriguing to me.  I actually enjoyed that there were no words in the comic and it was simply pictures. I think one of my favorite pages was the one with all of the clouds. I think that it really showed time and distance well with all the different kinds of clouds the character was seeing on the ship. I really liked that it touched on what it's like from an immigrant's standpoint showing the struggles and all of the work it took to acclimating to somewhere new and foreign. I was confused at some parts in the beginning but I think that was intentional because the character was also confused. Everything was in a different language than what he was used to and the foods were so different. I also liked ...
Read more