Rewrite: Calvin and Hobbs

Reading a great deal of Calvin and Hobbs you begin to notice things, things like how the as an artist like Bill Watterson gets to know his characters, they evolve, visually, until they reach a point of visual refinement that few other cartoonists ever truly achieve. The artistic style of Calvin and Hobbs is deceptive, on a cursorily glance, it seems simple, Calvin’s just a handful of lines, very simply described right? Wrong. In the few lines Bill Watterson uses to construct Calvin, or Hobbs, or any of his characters, he’s able to reveal so very much about each of them. He can show us where the character is holding their weight based on the thickness of the line, the line weight. Bill Watterson’s ability to construct a pose for each of his characters is unrivaled. Each pose struck is so simple, but the weight is always perfect, and the character of the pose is always obvious, instantly readable but almost never stereotypical or cliché, always original and always entertaining. As someone who has tried to emulate Bill Watterson’s style before, it is really really tough. If you choose just about any panel of Calvin and Hobbs and delve into it you’ll find all the layers I listed above and more. Bill Watterson’s drawings look effortless, and I’m sure eventually they were to him to some degree, but each stroke in the frame is painstakingly planned out and is placed perfectly, attempting to draw in Bill Watterson’s style is not a feat that should be take lightly.

Arabian Nights

This 1943 retelling of the classic Arabian Nights tales is a very visually busy and sometimes confused story. The thing that seems to be the most off to me, or perhaps this was intentional, in the sections that are set in the “real world”, aka not in a tale, world seems flat, things in the distance feel like they’re painted on the wall like in a play instead of really being off in the distance. I think on the characters, the varied line weight really helped give the characters an amount of form and detail, even though they seem to be anatomically exaggerated. The main character Schehere’Zadem, for instance, has an overly long neck and body. The use of flat color over the whole piece also seems to flatten the space contained in the frame as well, the thing that seemed to make the characters pop was the use of saturation, less saturation in the background and more saturation in the characters. There isn’t much in the way of shading and the only way the piece seems to show depth is in taking away detail or blacking out a form entirely to make it seem far away.

Penny-Arcade

It started small, a funny little comment poking fun and giving opinions on games with a particular brand of humor. Now Penny-Arcade it a huge force that not only comments on games, but creates games of its own. Penny-Arcade, while usually centering on Tycho and Gabe, two gamers who have defined the protagonists for game humor based webcomics, the strip has added other characters when needed and has even had all sorts of one strip character, usually guys working at some game studio who did something note worthy that week so Penny-Arcade decides that the best way to lampoon the situation will be by portraying people that actually have something to do with the story. Penny-Arcade is very much a topical comic, most of the time their subject matter includes new games, they usually end up either popularizing or creating a shared joke about said game, or gaming industry news. They also frequently “borrow” popular video game characters to put them in comical circumstances, again usually a one shot deal. Reasonably recently they have started doing multi-strip story arcs that sometimes have nothing to do with anything else going on in the comic, they’re just like a random break from the standard formula and I think it really keeps things interesting. These multi-strip stories are usually video game based, or very much video game like in nature. These strips tend to be about some sort of struggle or adventure and are usually very well done, the writing is superb, especially for a web comic.

Watchmen

The Watchmen, the seminal work by Alan Moore that helped redefine the superhero in the minds of comic readers everywhere. Moore tried to envision a world where superheroes are real (or rather masked vigilantes), and if that was the case who would take to such a life? The only people who would be drawn to that world would be psychopaths, sociopaths, and the impotent who can only feel powerful if they’re fighting crime. In Moore’s alternate 1985 things are very very then the real 1985, my personal favorite difference is the fact that Richard M. Nixon is a 5th term president, scary thought, technology is more advanced, but the cold war was a frightening as ever. As Moore explored who would be drawn to the world of masked vigilantism in a very realistic light, so too did he explore how the world’s dynamics would change if a real superhero where brought into the world, via Doctor Manhattan. As soon as Dr. Manhattan came into existence, of course, the government snatched him up and used him as a weapon, he ended Vietnam in a week, and he was the single biggest deterrent the United States had against nuclear war. Moore’s world building was so fluid and dynamic I couldn’t help but get sucked into this world of dank back alley crimes, and big international crises. I’m also a big fan of David Gibbon’s artwork throughout the book. His characters have great form and are wildly appealing to look at, and few of them follow the usual big tough body structure that most superheroes do (Night Owl 2 is overweight for Pete’s sake!), Rorschach is one of my all time favorite costumed vigilante ever, what I thought was always really cool was his use of color. While Moore was weaving a narrative that subverted the usual hero archetypes the usual hero colors, the primaries, red, blue, and yellow, were replaced by dominantly secondary and tertiary colors, greens and oranges and purples, and a great deal of brown. These visual choices helped set Watchmen apart from any other super hero comic the moment you read your first page.

Asterix

Asterix is the story of a village of Gauls resisting Roman occupation by drink the magic potion that the village mage creates. Astrix is a fun loving rapscallion who spends his time having fun with the Romans and protecting his village. The drawing style reminds me of a lot of American comedy comics, the characters all drawn with a thick black line, with a thicker outline. It’s very flat and graphic, and the use of color throughout the comic, very flat and mostly very saturated colors, flatness the picture plane of each frame even more. Though the use of blocked out colors, usually a purple, did help create some depth in the frames as making the whole characters or objects that single darker color helped bring them forward in space. Through the technique of flat uses of color in this way, the artist who drew Asterix, Albert Uderzo, was able to achieve depth despite the fact that he was using only flat colors. The characters are appealing and fun cartoon characters, though they do have very stock, one dimensional personalities. Asterix is your typical cartoon protagonist, a trouble maker who always really means well, in this case protecting his village, and his best friend Obelix is the stock dumb strong sidekick.

The Arrival

Now to start off talking about this comic, it must first be stated that it contains no words what-so-ever. Ok, so, since the pictures have to tell the entire story the drawings a beautiful and refined. The color scheme is monochromatic and the drawings are so detailed and refined that it makes the comic seem like a photo album. The photo album feel is a very interesting contrast to the events this seeming format presents, which are more fantastical and fair tale like then any real life event. It should also be noted that as you go through the piece, signs, labels, and other objects that should have text on them all have a made up language written on them so we couldn’t read it anyway. The photo album feel is easily identifiable and accessible to the reader, while the foreign text found in the format helps give the piece such an odd, other worldly feel. We identify with the characters and we even recognize the world, but when the strange text, the alien creatures, and the very unusual everyday household items are added we suddenly fell out of place in this world. In the end this is a story about human emotion that’s completely accessible to anyone, just like any good fantasy story, if there are characters and an emotional core you can connect with, you’ll accept just about any crazy thing that goes on in the world.

Maus

A groundbreaking graphic novel, the first graphic work recognized as a piece of legitimate literature. It won critical acclaim and even garnish a Pulitzer in its long list of awards. The art style is in black and white with value work accomplished through subtle line work, which blends together to form the values needed. The characters don’t tend to have a thick outline but still have a clear form. The characterizations of different ethnic classes through the use of animals were brilliant throughout this work. Making the Jewish people, the hunted people, mice, while making the Nazis cats, mice’s natural predator, was a very clever, instantly visceral image of the cats rounding up and hunted but cats. Jews of the time were seen as rats, mice, pests by the German people in the 30s and 40s, and they were treated like vermin, just like how we treat mice. The Poles were represented by pigs, but not in a fifthly way, they were more selfish, often truing away and not wanting to have anything to do with the problems of the Jews. The French portrayed as frogs both bring about the stereotype that the French eat frogs and it gave them a sliminess, and grossness, since Art didn’t want to forget the French’s years of Anti-Semitism. The Americans represented by dogs, strong, fast, generally good natured, though often short sighted and easily distracted creatures, wait am I still stalking about dogs or us? There was an interesting scene later on in the novel, after Art and his remaining family get out of the camps, when Art and his father pick up a black hitchhiker, and then part way into the trip, Art’s father leaps into a racist tirade against the poor man, illustrating to Art that even though they went through this experience they still hadn’t learned.

Fat Freddie's Kat

Fat Freddie’s Cat is an unusual comic for me, I’m very much used to the modern superhero and newspaper comic, and the underground comics are a new world to me. The style of Fat Freddie’s Cat is clearly limited by the resources available to the underground comics, there’s no color, the images aren’t very complex and would be easy to print, and with the exception of the first story in the volume that I read, each story last only a page, usually four panels. The styles in which the characters and environments are drawn remind me a great deal of Canadian style animations such as the classic “The Cat Came Back”. Space is very simplistically represented by very simple light shading, usually some hatching lines to imply form and distance. There is an amount of craftsmanship to the drawings, the characters aren’t anatomically perfect, but they are pretty consistent, which, to me, implies some amount of training for the artist at some level. These comics tend to have a very crude sense of humor, often involving the Cat pissing on something, or crapping on something (or usually in Freddie’s shoe). By today’s standards the jokes are pretty lame, but they we’re the jokes you were seeing in the mainstream comics of the time, the Sunday funnies and such. They were more straight-laced and family friendly, I think the comics code had something to do with that. Yet these comics existed outside that realm and eventually began influencing the mainstream more and more as time went on.

Tezuka's Buddha Vol 1 Review

I just finished reading Battle Angel Altia just before diving into this work, and can there be a bigger difference between these works? Altia is a scifi action series centered on the battles of a cyborg warrior, and Buddha is, well, a retelling of the story of Buddha. Visually these to pieces are wildly different, as Tezuka’s signature style, which graced my childhood in the form of the original Astro Boy, is on display in Buddha. Tezuka’s style is more cartoony, with anatomy sometimes getting a bit lost, the characters are not nearly as crazy detailed as Battle Angel’s but they are probably more enduring for it. I have never heard the story of Buddha before, I know the general idea, but the specifics have never been known to me, but if I never knew that this was the story that Buddhism is based on, retold, I would have enjoyed the ride all the same. The characters in Buddha, while being these figures from this religion, stayed human and appealing, I was able to connect with these characters because they’re flawed, not idealized characters. I really enjoyed the story; the only thing that threw me was how quickly Tatta seemed to get past his families deaths. Buddha does have the classic anime “overacting” going on, though in this time, and still today, American comics were doing much the same, but mostly only in the funnies these days. Overall this was a brilliant piece, and now that I really examine Tezuka’s work in context, I can see the huge affect he had on every anime or manga that followed him, even my personal favorite, Mobile Suit Gundam was very Tezuka like at its inception in the late 70s.

Battle Angel Altia Review

For me, reading this manga was very nostalgic, while I had never read this particular manga before, I did used to read quite a bit a manga, and sometime in high school I stopped. Remembering what it was like to discover the strange, larger than life stories manga had to offer cam rushing back to me. Reading the fantastically ridicules Berserker series came to mind as I read Battle Angle Altia. I thought it was an interesting choice to drop us into a world, with, from what I gleamed, has a very rich history behind it, and then letting us grasp at straws until they finally gave us enough info to understand, sort of, what was happening, or at least who was who, seemed like a risky choice. While I knew I had the next few issues waiting for me, anyone who was reading this month by month it was probably infuriating waiting for the next issue, I would have contemplated not even getting the next issue. I think the decision paid off though, I was hooked and I couldn't wait to understand the world to which I was just introduced, and the characters that inhabit it. The art certainly helped, it had that super cool, kinetic, wholly designed look that all my favorite manga’s do. The level of detail in each panel and the thought behind how machines and the rules of the world work has always blown me away in manga and Battle Angle is no exception. There is a clearly defined logic behind this world, and from what I read, was not deviated from. This taste of the series has most defiantly peaked my interest and I hope to track down some more in my free time.

Blankets

An interesting and extraordinarily personal graphic novel that is unlike any graphic novel I have read before. Craig Thompson’s drawing style was a fascinating graphic abstraction, in which he often did not concern himself with drawing the exact same character in every panel, in fact from panel to panel the characters changed slightly, but the characters maintained so iconic part, be it their hairstyle, cloths, what-have-you, that kept continuity between panels and, as a result, throughout the story. It’s fascinating to read an autobiographical graphic novel, it’s simply something I have never encountered before, or even considered as a possibility really. There were elements of Craig’s struggle I could identify with, mostly in his doomed romance and awkward high school years as opposed to his traumatic childhood. My childhood was not traumatic and my parents are both lovely people who didn't scare the carp out of me the way Craig’s dad scared him. Craig seemed to be going through some similar things I was through, I too was raised in a nice, Christian, Midwestern town, though I was in Kansas and the city was not too far away. Unlike Craig I never really subscribed too heavily in the Christian beliefs everyone seemed to have, I went to a youth group meeting once with a friend, and was so weirded out by the experience that I never went again. I have had relationships that felt like something more than they turned out to be though, and I went through the same emotional arc again with Craig as he got wrapped up in the passion, and then reality came crashing in at the end, I’ve been there. Fascinating too was Craig’s visual representation of feelings, the fires of hell when he felt like he was sinning, feeling uncomfortable in a crowd by crowding the page with people, or finding a beautiful whimsical design to represent the feeling of the breath of the girl he liked as he observed her sleeping. This was clearly a very personal piece to the author/artist and that came through on every page.

Calvin and Hobbs

A classic comic strip, mention Calvin and Hobbs to people of the right age and they just melt with nostalgia. Calvin and Hobbs were a cultural phenomenon that seems to be universally loved by the American audience it reached (in particular). I believe this is because Bill Watterson was able to hit on some pretty common veins in everyone’s childhood. Calvin is more cleaver than most kids, or at least has a larger vocabulary, but Watterson built the strip around such a heartfelt center, a friendship between a boy and his imaginary friend Tiger that it is instantly accessible. Add to that Watterson’s hilarious and refined drawings, that are just so very appealing to look at, and the strip radiated humor and warmth at every turn. Watterson was also very much connected personally with the strip, it was always written, drawn lettered, and colored on Sundays by Watterson himself and his personal connection to the strip helped it stay as authentic as it could possibly be. Calvin was just like any kid, mischievous, brilliant, but only on his terms, and at his core kind. Watterson had an uncanny ability to boil an idea down to its basics and keep it totally recognizable which also abstracting the it completely, there’s one strip in particular that embodies this amazing talent Watterson had for cutting to the core of an idea (I wish I could find it). In this strip we see Calvin as cattle being herded, as a fish out of water, as a robot, on an assembly line having slimy radioactive stuff pored into his head and at the end Calvin comes home from school! It’s brilliant every time I look at it! Every image captures a feeling, and Watterson had a real talent for that.

Understaing Comics and McCloud's TED talk too!

McCloud brings up several interesting notions that I, honestly, had never once considered before. I have read many comic books and even several graphic novels in my day, but I had never attempted to analyze comics on a more fundamental level. I had always only paid attention to the drawing skill or the writing skill of the artist/author, but I had never considered the medium before. To think about the art of comics on the level of what it means to abstract something, which I have considered before, but I had never considered it in relation to comics, or even how words relate to that abstraction. Also, the notion of juxtaposition as it relates to comic panels was interesting to dissect, how we, the readers, are given as series of images, and because we notice similarities or can relate these images together, we make the leap that time passes between panels and actions which are crucial to understand the story take place. Which is an aspect unique to comics, as a medium like animation, which is a series of images juxtaposed as well, has the benefit of time being represented by time as 24 frames a second connect actions for the audience (not to say there are not similar juxtaposed understanding that need to be made in animation, but the entire medium is not based around this idea). In addition, McCloud’s thoughts that he shared in his TED discussion, about where he sees comics expanding in the digital age were extraordinarily fascinating. The idea that using the monitor as a window to be able to view a comic as a long sting of images set side by side as opposed to the edge of the canvas forcing us to break that continuous train of thought is a most intriguing and curiously unused harnessing of this technology. When one orders a digital copy of a Marvel Comic, for instance, the comic is represented in the context of a page, just like the tangible equivalent, but this seems silly and short sighted. Another way that I have noticed people have started to utilize digital technology for comics are in the form of motion comics, which real just bridge on the edge of just limited animation and doesn't use any of the elements that McCloud discusses that make comics an unique medium.