Week 9: A Wide World of Comics

For this week's blog post, I read one of the "Blacksad" comics. The one I read was "Amarillo." I think personally this ended up being one of my favorite comics I've read this semester. It was full of action, color, and entertaining as hell. I kind of liked that the comic was done like "Maus" and the people were animals. I liked it even better because there were way more different types of animals than in "Maus." I've only done a couple illustrations with stylized human-like animals and they are not always easy to portray emotions with and I think this comic artist did a fantastic job with the balance of human emotion and movements with animalistic features. I think the story telling was done really well and the action panels were especially successful. The movement within the panels translated really well in my opinion and it was almost like watching a movie but with one of those old view masters so it's only one frame at a time but if you do it fast enough you can fully see the action and movement almost as if its completely fluid. 

I also really enjoyed that the comic was in full color. In one page towards the beginning and then again at the end it showed a more sketch-like image that was just in black on this taupe/greyish background which was also kind of nice to see a less refined version than what's shown throughout the comic because it's like showing the process and what it looks like before it's fully fleshed out but then you get to see the fully finished colored version and you can appreciate it even more for what it is and the work that went into it. I can only estimate how long it took do fully color and clean up all of the lines within this comic. I think with the amount of characters and background details it had to have taken a hot minute to fully finish. 

I definitely think this will be a comic that I explore more of because I really want to find out more about John's back story. It was kind of funny to see him like fully dressed in his suit just casually driving a motorcycle in this comic and he seems like such a trustworthy guy I really want to know why the one cops have this like beef/vendetta against him. 

I also would have loved to see flash backs of Eva's back story because it'd be nice to compare what she looked like back then compared to what we seen in this comic. It was also kind of sad to see Chad and his story because he never really meant to kill some of the people that died within the story besides Abe of course but like he was just a straight up ass, so I didn't feel that bad about him dying. The other two were accidents and the one he didn't even commit, it was Eva.

I did feel really terrible about Neal dying because he was just trying to show Chad that like he needed to get his head out of his ass and live his life and put his work out there and ugh if Chad would have just let him go get his scroll out of the bathroom and not tussled with his Neal would still be alive. I think that was the only death in the comic that I was really not happy at all about because he was a decent guy and entertaining. I would also be interested to see how far back him and John's story goes. Anyway I'm getting carried away now and this blog post is getting long so I'll cut it off here but all in all I thoroughly enjoyed this comic and can't wait to read more.