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.