week 9

This week I read Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese. Although the comic was in Italian, and most of time while trying to decipher the material, I found myself just trying to figure out each illustrated panel rather than continue attempting to read the text. The illustrations were clear and highly detailed like a animators sketchbook. There was a definite era time difference, From the way the people held themselves to the the ships using large sails to travel, along with the type of clothing the characters were wearing. I had to reread the comic several times just because the imagery suggests a faster pace in movements when a fight begins to brew. Altogether the comic was enjoyable to read in a sense. Stories that have a historical semi-plot can usually grab a readers attention faster just because of the years of history we take while attending grade school. The imagination can develop the pacing faster and what the rest of the environment may look like just based on few artifacts in the comic.

week 7

Maus was a very easy read in itself, but emotionally difficult. The story starts out in a sweet manner of son visiting his father and his new wife, but asks his father to tell him the story of the war with the nazis. You follow his story from the moment he meets his wife into marriage and having their first child, all the normal everyday life stuff. But when he starts to tell the story of how he became a prisoner of war, I felt myself getting anxious knowing death and torture would soon enter the storyline. He stayed strong while living in the cold tents, until he was able to be relocated to a place that had warm beds and food to eat as long as he worked each day. He was able to sneak upon a train and convince a polish officer to hide him from the germans, using their disgust of germans to his advantage. When he's finally reunited with his family, as is well for a moment. Soon he finds himself working on the black-market for whatever he can find to help bring in food for the entire family. Then the camps start, and the grandparents are being taken away, the family starts to be split up. The family had been hiding where they could in bunkers or attics with secret compartments where the dogs couldn't find them. Even when people had protected them in their homes, the germans would raid it and he and his family would have to leave to find another safe place. But as things became worse he set a plan to escape to Hungary, but his wife nervous as ever, felt they didn't need to leave because they had a safe house. And eventually the police figured out he was hiding his gold watch in the bottom of shoe polish and arrested him, sending him to a camp. The second volume continued on with the son going to visit his father again, but this time in the summer home. The father assumed his son and girlfriend would stay for the entire summer. And then the father continues his story of the camps, how at first he had complained the shoes were too big, and he got hit. But he was thankful that the showers were not gas showers, it was another day to try and live. He began to lose hope in life until a priest had explained the numbers of his arm each a had meaning, bringing life back into him. One of the officers was interested in learning english and kept him to the side while feeding him a feast of food. And through his connections he was able to help friends with getting items such as belts or shoes. During his time in the camps he did various other jobs that benefitted both hims and his wife, when the germans needed something fixed or done. But eventually he lost his jobs, and had to begin help with building the gas chambers. As the war came to the end the people from the camps were taken to woods or other random places and let nature take its toll, or even some soldiers would shoot them on the spot.
The comic is very fluid in its design and storytelling, but on a more personal level it was difficult. I have heard too many personal stories from my own family members when they're parents and grandparents were in the camps and trying to fend for their lives. But the story does give you a deep sense of sadness by the way the story cuts back and forth to the son and father discussing little things going on in the daily life and how the father would rather not tell something so sad for a book, but does it anyway for his son.

week 6

Robert Crumb, The book of Mr. Natural is interesting in the way they design the characters so simply, but then give the backgrounds and or environments more detail. But also in this comic, they illustrate the black people very crudely. The stories are very quick to read and understand but have a almost messy disorganized feel to them especially in the 3rd comic with the man on the street meditating while Mr. Natural gives away his money and he becomes more agitated.  The messy-ness that i feel could be just the amount of black in certain panels. Reading further the comics became explicit and downright revolting, the drawing of the genitalia was bad enough but for the story to continue and him getting off on a baby looking person was the point where I had to stop.

week 5

Reading The spirit #2 issue, I immediately realized the era in which it was wrote. The design for the assistant was extremely racist. The small uneducated blackman was depicted almost as a monkey like creature. The story begins with a masked man know as The Spirit, crippled walking down the sidewalk when a man throws his entire body into hims and knocks the spirit down. Realizing the severity of the injures the man phones one of the mobsters up to let them know its the time to attack since he's so weak. The spirits sidekick runs off to the detective to tell him whats become of Spirit. They both set off to wait for the mobsters at one of the known locations. The spirit meanwhile was picked up off the street and thrown into the back of the car of the mobsters. where they twist his arm in pain. They bring him back to one of the other locations where the mobsters keep their loot. Once the Spirit is in the building he throws a punch to one of the mobsters. He had fooled them into thinking he was injured so they could lead him to their hiding place. He knocks out the mobsters and ties them up and drives them to the detective to be thrown in jail. Besides the racial depiction of the characters, the story is very fluid and very easy to read. The story takes an unexpected turn to save the day.

week 4

Unable to find Art Spiegelman's Jack Cole and Plastic Man  comic without purchasing something online, I opted out and read The adventure of TINTIN adventures on the moon. Tintin  and the group wake up on the rocket mid space. They had fell asleep during takeoff and as ground control tries to call on them, Snowy the dog hears and the voice and wakes Tintin. Two detectives had stuck aboard the ship and thought they were being clever only to discover that the ship had already taken off before they could get off. The captain upset with the two knuckleheads yells at them for coming aboard the ship since they had only contained enough oxygen for four people and now theres six. The captain sends them off only to drink whiskey in the cabin with snowy.  The detectives seem to be the catalysts for things going wrong on the ship as the story continues. The captain is so drum he decides to climb out of the ship and Tintin must go outside and retrieve him. Towards the end they land of the moon and explore it and find the bad guys and capture them. The comic has a lot of text to read, which draws out the story to be longer for the viewers,but some of the panels aren't different enough to really show a movement thats important, leaving very little to the imagination to bring the story to life even more.

The Haunt of Fear, the first comic tells the story of the werewolf who fell in love with a vampire. The werewolf who was once a man had been traveling through the woods only to fall and be scratched by wolves bane and by the next full moon he changed. When he was feeding on his victim, a beautiful  woman came around and started to drink the blood of the victim. Instead of fighting, they shared their first kill and fell in love. Eventually the towns people found them, thinking they had killed the two brought them to the devils graveyard where they lived in the moseleum  where they married with the dead around them and they gave birth to a baby. Who turned out to be the witch who tells the story.