Stereotype and Ethics

Ho Che Anderson, King

I found some extra time this week and read ahead so I have more time to work on my thesis.

We all know who Dr. King's is and the story of his life, but this comic makes it out to be almost a mythical legacy than a historical story. I think that has mostly to do with the artwork itself, it's gorgeous.

I absolutely love how the use of photograph images, sketched in black and white, and the splashes of color. The art is very impressionistic and it would sometimes be hard to understand what's happening if you don't already have an idea of King's life.

One of the things I would have liked was to have a few more pages dedicated to King's "Mountaintop Speech" he gave before his death. I mean, that's considered one of the best speeches given in America

What I found refreshing about this piece was that Anderson's King character is not portrayed as a "saint" who can do no wrong and only wanted peace. This Dr. King seems more like a man; he gets angry, horny, hungry and has moments of almost crippling despair. So all-in-all, he's a human being. No man is perfect, but now decades later, that's what the textbooks make him out to be. The truth was that while he was alive, not everyone in the country understood what he was setting out to do and just stood there applauding him.

Film

Persepolis

I wasn't able to find this on Netflix, but I was able to find a website to watch it online.

This film was definitely interesting; it's a coming-of-age story about Satrapi's experiences growing up in Iran and Austria. I haven't read the book, but I'm sure that it's as close as possible especially since Satrapi herself directed the movie. I think it'd much easier to turn a comic book into a movie than it would novel simply because of all the visuals you already have something to go off of for inspiration. This is an animated movie so it looks like it stayed true to the original art/designs.

At first glance I found the art style to be very simplistic in design, especially compared to other comics that we've read in class this semester. All of the characters each have their own unique line work and shape along with their own defining characteristics; the father Ebi has a thick black mustache, Uncle Anoosh has wavy hair and a moustache, the grandma has a thick head of white hair and wrinkles on her face, and the adult version of Marjane has a small beauty mark. The environment that the characters are in also don't have much detail and in my opinion could be labeled "sparse."

Going back to what Scott McCloud said in Understanding Comics, he argues that all lines inherently convey meaning. Any line can become open to interpretation and so I don't feel that Satrapi's art should be labeled as simplistic.

Legitimation

Art Spiegelman's Complete Maus (Vol. 1 and 2)

I tried to take more time reading this comic, but I ended up reading it pretty fast to get through it. Partially because I didn't have much time in my busy schedule, but also because I wasn't all that interested. The truth is that I'm pretty sick of hearing about the Holocaust, and if that makes me a bad person then so be it.

I did think this was a worthwhile read from a literary stand point, but about a day after finishing it I found the comic pretty much fading from my memory. The whole recount of the event of the Holocaust didn't have much of an impact on me, which is probably because I'm so familiar with it all now that it doesn't horrify me anymore. Kind of like how when I was young horror movies, hell even X-Files PREVIEWS, used to scare the crap out of me, but now I haven't been scared by a movie in I don't know how many years. You get conditioned after a while, which is sad but the truth.

The artwork wasn't anything special either. There were a lot of times where I had to pause and decide if I should read the text first or look at the visuals. And that took me out of the story, and so I don't think the novel as a whole was put together very well. I did love the artistic choice to represent people from different nationalities as their appropriate animal forms though (e.g. Jews as mice and Germans as cats). That I found to be very impactful.



Film
Barefoot Gen

I had never even heard of this movie before, but I'm glad I was able to make the time to watch it. This is a really strong story, and I guess it makes sense that it would be as it's an autobiography of Keiji Nakazawa - who survived the Hiroshima bombing.

I really think that this would be a good movie to show to students in class. I remember being slightly bored in like 7th grade when I had a trimester when my teacher taught us about the Holocaust and WWII. The film brings home some of the horrors from the event, but it also doesn't try and place the blame on America. In the end, I think that just makes the film even more powerful since it would be so easy to make a movie more "anti-American."

Mr. Natural the Horny Mystic and Adult Disney

Robert Crumb, The Book of Mr. Natural

Well all I really have to say is that the Mr. Natural comics were definitely not what I thought they'd be, and they kind of took me by surprise with how graphic and vulgar they were. Especially since they have almost an innocent, simple drawing quality to them.

The character himself is a very moody person, is pretty cynical, and he seems to have some weird sexual obsessions. Like in the strip where he ends up dreaming on a bus, gets kicked off the bus with a baby, tricks the baby into giving him a blow job, and then ends up in jail for child molestation. He definitely isn't doing what I would expect a holy person to do; swearing, womanizing, child molestation, appears heartless at times, and his advice to others - when he does give it, using usually crazy sounding.

I still am not really sure what to think of it, and I think part of that may simply have to with me not having a Y chromosome. Mr. Natural seems to be a very self-indulgent personality that pretty much does whatever comes to him. I think this comic series does examine the psychology of men, mostly the baser instinct and ideas surrounding sex. Mr. Natural seems to act, at least to me in some aspects, on his basic instinct if his decisions were not influenced by society pressures or morals.



Air Pirates Funnies

This page from the comic book just made me laugh so hard. It's so simple, yet reminds me of drunk conversations with friends lol

I find it odd how this book would be considered pretty vulgar too, but I don't mind it much as compared to the Mr. Natural comics. Part of that may simply be because I find this really funny cause it goes against everything Disney - puritanism, patriotism, consumerism, and conformity.

I figured that there would be a lawsuit from Disney, so I looked that up and yep! There definitely was. I read that Dan O'Neill, the author, was so eager for Disney to sue him that he even smuggled a copy into a Disney company board meeting. It was a really interesting case, especially since legally O'Neill never won the case, but he never went to jail so he saw it as a 'win.' He kept disregarding the courts' decisions, until Disney finally settled and dropped the case as long as he stopped abusing their copyrights with the Pirates comix. Disney ended up with something like $190,000 in damages and over $2,000,000 in legal fees.

Dan O'Neill also became the youngest syndicated cartoonist in American newspaper history at the age of 21.