Sydnie's Blog

For this week's comic, I read some of the "March" comics and I really enjoyed the art style within them. I like that they were black and white and I appreciated the wide variety of characters and how they all looked distinctly different. I also found it very easy to follow and read. I especially enjoyed the dynamic page layouts and how a lot of the borders of the frames were broken out of and then when you hit one of those black pages with the high contrast all around. Wonderfully done and super powerful. The way the pages were set up made it even more interesting and intriguing to read because it broke things up and wasn't just the same layout repeated over and over again. They made you want to keep reading (along with the storytelling of course). I think it's hard to talk about stereotypes in comics with this particular set of comics only because it's history and not just something made up so obviously there would be some amount stereotyping. However, when i...

For this week's reading, it was honestly kind of rough to get through only because of the subject matter and how heavy it was at times and it was the same for the film we watched in class. Personally when I read if the writing/visuals are good then I can feel what the characters I'm reading about are or might have been feeling. Since both the reading and film were very raw and straight forward it hit me kind of hard in some moments to see the effect of tragedies on some characters.             I had previously read Maus in high school so it was like a refresher on the graphic novel and that way I kind of already knew what was coming so it didn’t have that shock factor that I had the first time around reading it. Even though I wasn’t shocked at what happened it still hit hard because I am well aware that the events from the novel actually happened and that they effected so many people and how much suffering some people had to...

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...

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 some...

It's really interesting to see the difference between when comics were first starting out to where they are now. With this week's comics it's clear to see that there was a much bigger emphasis on the text used with the images within the panels. I read a little bit of the Airboy comics and there weren't hardly any panels that didn't have text to go along with it. It was also interesting to see the difference in how comics had color applied to them. With these comics it seemed stamp like and so sometimes not everything would match up perfectly so there would be some instances where the colors were out of the lines that they were intended to be in. I liked that some of the words were in bold type because they just read differently in my opinion. I like comics like this where your mind just automatically thinks up what certain things are making certain sounds like in one page the barn is set on fire and my brain just automatically thought of crackling fire sounds and wh...

For this weeks reading I did a little bit of everything (i.e.  Little Nemo ,  Peanuts, and Krazy Kat ). I personally gravitated towards reading more  Little Nemo  purely based on the feeling it gave me. I really liked the composition of the panels and the color schemes. For awhile I was struggling to read the text on them and then I realized there was a button to click to get the high resolution version and that definitely made life a whole lot easier after that.  I liked that the panels weren’t all the same and that some were really long and sometimes they were really narrow and portrait instead of being landscape. I think one of my favorites was the one with the forest that he couldn’t touch which he ended up doing and the panel where the forest was all falling down was so cool looking to me with the perspective and the long narrow panel. I also really enjoyed the color scheme because it had a very vintage feel to it but also dreamlike which makes sense bec...

While I was on the fence about whether I liked the comic as a whole I did find some of Scott McCloud's ideas quite interesting. I didn't always agree with his opinion but with his ideas of reading in between the gutters of the panels that actually contain all of the action I definitely agreed with him.  In some circumstances there’s an action that happens in between two panels and it’s up to us as the readers to use context clues and logic to piece together what happened. In a lot of cases it’s simple things that we do everyday or fairly often to which in turn our brain automatically understands the action that happened in space of the gutter to get us to the next panel’s action or scene.  An example of this would be the two panels of the man sleeping and there’s a spider on the blanket and then in the next panel the spider is in a different spot even closer to the man sleeping. Our minds naturally put two and two together and come up with the conclusion that the spider m...