On Our Final Project

I had grand ideas. Strange ideas...ideas that, at the time I did not know, involved advanced psychology rhetoric. This past week I had been doing research on face perception and recognition. It's really fascinating and I even found an article on how autistic children could recognize and distinguish cartoon faces through conventional thought processes but had to go about different cognitive methods to do the same for actual faces. All this was very interesting but also very hard to synthesize.

Not that hard is bad. I love a challenge, who doesn't, right? But my research brought to the Comm library which has a great collection of editorial and various other types of cartoons. It also has a lot of old comics like Popeye, Flash Gordon, and, my favorite, Krazy Kat. I started reading some accompanying essays and got on to another topic. After researching, I came to the conclusion that I really like normal, research-based essays.

It's pretty rewarding to read and digest a bunch of smart sounding stuff and cite them on paper. So I'm taking the start of comic art and comparing it to modern works, which we've read in class, to talk about the major elements of the form. And there's even going to be a works cited page.

FUN HOME's Conclusion

I couldn't help, despite the amount of information and insight throughout, that I didn't get a lot of info out of Fun Home. There were so many times that I wanted her to explain more or to show another letter or to expand on a scene, but she never did. I see how it worked in the piece, to make it more of a reflection instead of a narrative, but as a person, not as a critical student of literature, it made me anxious and unfulfilled. But I suppose that's the sign of a good book, etc...that you want it to continue after it ends.

An interesting use of panels in Fun Home, was how they were used to incorporate more text to the page. Passages of letters and novels set background to the narration. I liked this implementation better than in Watchmen, were it became a strange jump from panels to text. They both accomplished the same goal, authentication, but Fun Home seemed more natural (although that's easy to do when comparing a memoir to a story about blue naked supermen).

FUN HOME and things that are loosely related to class (maybe an excuse?)

Fun Home continues to be one of my favorite reads in the class, though I often am daunted by the literary references. I am one of three people in America who didn't have The Great Gatsby assigned in a high school English and am lost with all such allusions (minus the Robert Redford-reference).

I also have never read Proust. Though I find those sections more educational that dependent on previous knowledge.

But honestly, I'm slightly behind...not because I'm not interested I've just been overwhelmed. I'm performing in a stand up Monday night at Zanies in Chicago for the Regional Semi-Finals of a College comedy competition. Not that that's an excuse for not writing in depth blog posts... but its kind of cool, right?

More on Fun Home on Wednesday, maybe?!??!

FUN HOME

I'm not far in to the text so far tonight, but I figured I'd forget to blog if I waited too long and also something in the text struck so much that I felt the need to write about it.

On page 12:
"There are those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or Just disappointed by the design failure."

I thought that was such an interesting perspective...and one view of the myth that I had never considered. It characterizes the dad well too. His children were part of his still life of a home, part of the design. Foreshadowing perhaps to a disappointment, it gives a different look at a father figure.

It made me think of that poem by William Carlos Williams, which I guess then in turn conjures the image of the painting by Brugel? (Wikipedia told me: Pieter Brueghel's Landscape With The Fall of Icarus.) But maybe more so the poem, because such a violent horrible act such as falling from the sky and drowning in the sea is brought to greater attention in verse.

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning.

If his father was truly upset about the design his eyes would have stayed on the sun and the vapors that were once the wax wings and the splash would have gone quite unnoticed.

Stuck Rubber Baby

One thing that came to my attention while reading Stuck Rubber Baby is how real it seems. So much so that I just assumed it was an autobiography. Of course, I've been conditioned to think that with our past class readings. I mean, I really thought Alan Moore was the girl that became V at the end of V for Vendetta. No, I mean the autobiographical elements that were found in Blankets and portions of Potraits of Life. Toland is not Howard Cruse but I believe in everything that's happening. The logic of the novel all makes sense and the characters and anecdotes seem incredibly authentic. I think that adds to the power of the piece. The art is also really cool. Sometimes the characters seem a little caveman like, with thick necks, broad shoulders, and tight pants, but the style is very bold and eyecatching.

I'm only at Chapter 11 and it seems that this book, more than the others, is hard to judge without knowing the conclusion. Right now though, I'm really enjoying it.

Historical Comics

"Collier's work stands out like a beacon amidst other comics, entertaining and informing all at once." - EYE Magazine.

Boy Howdy are they right. I really like this style of comic and, not being a connoisseur on the subject, I've never read anything like this. It reads really well, it's aided by the visuals, and it seems like I'm learning something in a backwards kind of way.

I found the Grey Owl story totally fascinating. Not only the story of Grey Owl, but the stories within it the text that helped the narration. In the story, the reader is presented one primary narration... the narrator's skiing trek to Grey Owl's cabin. From the perspective of the traveler we are told many stories including:
1. The backstory as to how he ended up in the middle of a frozen lake under a moonless sky.
2. The story of his near-fatal experience in Temagami
3. The story of Grey Owl himself.
The layers make for a very engaging read. Each panel jumped back and forth through time and place but was still easily followed. It's fitting that Grey Owl, a great storyteller both in his writing and his own fictitious life, be the center of a story about telling stories.

This historical form made me think of some cool historical stuff that could benefit from a comic treatment. Mainly, the story of Beautiful Jim Key. He was this super smart horse that was a big world fair attraction around the end of the 19th century. He could supposedly spell and count and do all these wild things. The shown intelligence of this horse brought animal rights and other related issues out of the fringe and into mainstream thought. Maybe that'll be my mini-comic suggestion...maaaybe...

The End of V for Vendetta

The end of this was probably a million times better than the film. I really liked the way Moore left the status of the world hanging. It wasn't an "OH NO!" kind of cliffhanger ending like Watchmen. It had a sort of poetic closure similar to the end I liked so much in Blankets.

Finch walking down the road seems to parallel the silhouetted V walking out of the flames. The future is implied through that panel. It is uncertain, dark, dangerous, and maybe even worse than the past, but it solidifies that what V wanted was accomplished.

Finch's LSD trip, his descent into madness, into the insane head of V, was eye opening for him. I was confused then, that he killed V. I thought maybe he would see the face of his opponent and, not necessarily repent, but not riddle him with bullets. I'd be very curious what everyone else in the class thought about that...maybe I'm the only one?