The illustrations in Pride of Baghdad were stylized to evoke emotions of anger and sympathy in the reader. In McCloud's book he describes the various styles in which illustrations can be drawn that will influence different emotions. He also explains the types of lines used in illustrations that possess the ability to set a mood. An interesting comparison to Pride of Baghdad are the illustrations in the 9/11 Report that contain the same bibrant hues and detailed lines. Another point is the feelings one gets when simply reading the book and taking in the pictures.
A picture holds a thousand words. Nothing could be closer to the truth in McCloud's book, "Understanding Comics", where he explains how pictures can be reduced to words. On page 46 of his book McCloud asks the question, "Can any configuration of ink on paper be more abstracted from reality, yet still represent a face as clearly as this one?", he goes on the answer, "I say the answer is yes. Here's part of the solution. Just draw a line straight down from each of the dots to this height for the answer. Meaning retained, resemblance gone. Words are the ultimate abstraction." McCloud means that words are simply an abstraction of pictures. On a scale pictures can be abstract, such as words and sentences, or they can be detailed like the illustrations in Pride of Baghdad. The illustrator, Niko Henrichon, uses detail to depict numerous emotions; curiousity, worry, frustration and outrage are just a few but, the two main emotions that are evoked in the reader are anger and sympaty. McCloud covers another topic that describes this further.
This chapter is about lines and how an artist uses lines to stir up an emotional response from the reader. The specific term for this is called expressionism. With a bend, a straight line turns into an arched eyebrow expressing pain and anguish. Lines don't always have to be in place, such as the are of Rob Liefeld on page 126 of McCloud's book. In this panel drawn for a Marvel comic Liefeld illustrates a face up close with severe angles. There is no doubt that this person is angry. Along with it Liefeld uses jagged lines all over his face that accentuate the emotion of outrage. In Pride of Baghdad Henrichon makes great use of lines for his illustrations. Similar to Liefeld Henrichon depicts emotions in the characters with arched eyebrows, wrinkled foreheads and upturned mouths, but Henrichon steps out of creating emotion in the characters and uses simple lines to signify physical traits that create emotions in the reader. An example of this can be found on page 36 in Pride of Baghdad. On this page is an illustration of the older lioness named Safa. Her eyes are squinted, her nose is crinkled and her teeth are slightly bared showing that she's preparing to attack, but another detail reveals other information. Along her chest, legs, back and torso are random lines that range from a quarter of an inch to and inch in length. Some of them appear to define her muscle and where her joints bend, but a lot of them resemble scrapes and wounds from the past that have healed and scarred. These simple lines speak a lot about her character and past life. By looking at her the reader gets a sense that she's tough and unafraid to stand up and fight. The amount though also shows that she's probably been in a lot of fights and has led a tough life, which perhaps has bardened her.
Throughout Pride of Baghdad there are countless instances that cause the reader to feel sympaty for the lions and other animals. Towards the beginning when the zoo is underfire there are expressions of panic on the lions' faces. Other animals escape and just when a giraffe believes it's free its head is blown off by amunition. The graphic panels make a reader cringe and almost feel quilty. Another example of sympathy is when Safa, the older lioness, and Ali, the cub, come face ot face with an old snapping turtle while getting a drink. They've recently escaped from the zoo and have no idea what's going on. The turtle explains shat he recalls from the last war. He's bitter and cynical as he tells them how he lost all that he loved when the revers filled with oil from the previous war. There is a detailed illustration of all these turtles surfacing from the oil and trying to breathe, there's one on shor that appears dead and others coughing from ingesting oil.
Along with sympathy, anger is also evoked when the reader sees what people are doing to these animals due to their careless actions. At the end of Pride of Baghdad the lions as it appears have beaten all the obstacles, only killing in defense or to eat. As the sun sets over the city Ali, the cub, rushes to the top of a building to see his first sunset. The others follow anxious as well. They sit quietly thankful to be alive, and then out of nowhere Zii, the male lion, is shot and dies. Instinctively Safa charges the shooter in defense, but is shotdown, her body riddled by bullets. The next illustration shows Ali and his mother, Noor, instantly gunned down to death with blood spilling from everywhere. The U.S. soldier who shot them appears to feel guilty. He justifies that they charged him and he was left with no choice. Although none of the lions were even aware of their presence.
I do believe that the purpose of Pride of Baghdad was to stir up emotions in the reader and that sympathy and anger were definitely two prominent feelings I had throughout the book. These lions were simply attempting to survive in a foreign land and then the U.S. soldiers come marching in and masacre them. I believe a point that Vaughan and Henrichon were striving to prove is the inability for people to take responsibility for their actions, particularly U.S. soldiers. After shooting down all four lions he uses the excuse that one was charging him and he didn't have choice, as opposed to he was too scared and overreacted. Also on the next page following that scene it's written, "There were other innocent casualties as well." There are other examples of this neglect in the book. In the beginning everyone is fleeing the city and they throw a donkey carcus into the lion's den and leave them to fend for themselves. Which obviously didn't turn out too well.
Overall Pride of Baghdad is a very contraversial book about a contraversial issue. It provides several lessons yet to be learned in times of war and does an excellent job in expressing numerous mixed emotions that war conjures up. While pressured to side with humans because they are our own species, an honest mind has to take into consideration the potentially irrational decisions of the U.S. soldier and also all the innocent lives that are sacrificed during war. Like the war in Iraq, it is a mental battle that will never end. One thing is for certain though, the illustrations in Pride of Baghdad evoke emotions of anger and sympathy.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Final Exam
Question 1) I would define the line style of Pride of Baghdad as youthful, but very harsh. When looking at the illustrations you get a sense of the Lion King, but on a more violent level. The lines are detailed, but there are also many out of place. The out of place lines cause the characters to look as if they have many scars and old scrapes. This helps to portray the turmoil going on throughout the story and aids in developing the characters. By simply looking at them the reader gets the idea that these lions have led a rough and dangerous life. Like these old wounds they also haunted by memories of their past lives. These lines also set the chaotic mood for the story. There is a heavy density of lines of their faces that causes them to look stressed or confused, which helps create that anarchy of the setting. I'd say they're most similar to the example of Rob Liefeld's on page 126 of Scott McCloud's book.
Question 2) The web comic I read, although weird, is a good example for this question. It's called a Bucket Full O' Kittens, and it raises some interesting issues that deal with closure and time frames. Unlike most traditional comic books, this webcomic doesn't have any pnaels or closure. You simply scroll to the right and the pictures continue on in a constant stream. In a certain way I think this is easier to read. as opposed to having gutters that disrupt the story this one runs smoothly like a movie, and it is easy to follow along with the story. Although there is also an aspect of this format that becomes problematic. An important part of closure is that it sets the time line of the story. The reader has a better of idea the span of time that a story takes place in when there are gutters and closure. With a free flowing story like in Bucket Full O' Kittens the sense of time is lost and is harder to define where the past present and future are. A reader has to assume or imagine that the story is currently taking place and lasts for the amount of time that is takes to read it. Another hinderance with the digital format is that it doesn't leave room for the imagination to enter the story. The reader is left at a more bystander position as opposed to creating parts of the story. With a comic that has gutters, the reader is able to insert his or her own pictures and details and tailor the story to their imagination. With a webcomic though that really isn't an option. The free flowing form seems much more set. Like a movie viewer is left outside of the story.
Question 3) When discussing history in a GN first person voice is more effective. Using a first person voice helps that reader to relate to that person. They can recall events and explain their emotions at the time. Areader an view the story through that person's eyes and become part of the sotry. History is a lot about how it was perceived and the feelings that were provoked durng that time. With first person the reader has a better grasp on those emotions and can form a better inderstanding. The story becomes more interesting for the reader. With an omniscent voice the view is more deistant and can become more confusing. You might relate an omniscent voice to God because He is all knowing and a reader is going to have a harder time relating to god than to another human being. Through an omniscent voice everything is laid out before the reader, which can become confusing. It's harder to keep things in perspective while a story is jumping around. It's also harder to hold the reader's attention with an omniscent voice. Everything is there for the readerto see, but with first person every turn is a surprise that keeps the reaqder on their toes. The reader only knows as much as the character. This will also bring the reader closer to the story and experience the feelings of the character.
Question 4) For Pride of Baghdad, I believe Vaughan's and Henrichon's purpose was to further victimize those killed during the Iraq bombing. the illustrations are graphic and the dialogue humanizes the animals and the U.S. soldiers appear over reactive and highly agressive. This brings me to think that they wanted the reader to take the side of the animals/all the Iraqi victims. They chose to publish this story as a GN because it really gets the point across. The illustrations of animals being killed and their frustrations speak volumes to a reader and they are strongly affected by what they see. The pictures combined with the bias text has a lot of power to sway a person. With this book the text can be bias because it comes out as the opinions of the animals so reader won't pick up on it as readily. the matter of the bombing in Iraq is a contraversial issue and I think the author and illustrator were interested in having a voice in the matter. They wanted people to see their view on things and perhaps sway their reader because this book is far from neutral. I think choosing the form of a GN had a lot to do with what they wanted to leave out and how they wanted to arrange it. In this story they wanted to say little and still be able to affect the reader, and a GN does just that. They give one simple line in the end of the book, "There were other casualties as well." This is a small bias remark that leaves a load of room for interpretation. The way they arraged it they're able to write a small amount and say a lot. With Pride of Baghdad I think Henrichon and Vaughan ran into the problem of being too bias. This book almost goes too far and I'm sure they actually modified it from its original form. The pictures do a lot of the talking so it was wise that they left the dialogue short. I think this could become a new form of persuasive writng that is very effective. The art in this book is very compelling. It was wise to choose bright colors for the illustrations because it draws the reader's attention and makes a strong statement. It runs similar to a movie and the style is reminiscent of a cartoon, such as The Lion King. I think this also makes the book more interesting.
Question 2) The web comic I read, although weird, is a good example for this question. It's called a Bucket Full O' Kittens, and it raises some interesting issues that deal with closure and time frames. Unlike most traditional comic books, this webcomic doesn't have any pnaels or closure. You simply scroll to the right and the pictures continue on in a constant stream. In a certain way I think this is easier to read. as opposed to having gutters that disrupt the story this one runs smoothly like a movie, and it is easy to follow along with the story. Although there is also an aspect of this format that becomes problematic. An important part of closure is that it sets the time line of the story. The reader has a better of idea the span of time that a story takes place in when there are gutters and closure. With a free flowing story like in Bucket Full O' Kittens the sense of time is lost and is harder to define where the past present and future are. A reader has to assume or imagine that the story is currently taking place and lasts for the amount of time that is takes to read it. Another hinderance with the digital format is that it doesn't leave room for the imagination to enter the story. The reader is left at a more bystander position as opposed to creating parts of the story. With a comic that has gutters, the reader is able to insert his or her own pictures and details and tailor the story to their imagination. With a webcomic though that really isn't an option. The free flowing form seems much more set. Like a movie viewer is left outside of the story.
Question 3) When discussing history in a GN first person voice is more effective. Using a first person voice helps that reader to relate to that person. They can recall events and explain their emotions at the time. Areader an view the story through that person's eyes and become part of the sotry. History is a lot about how it was perceived and the feelings that were provoked durng that time. With first person the reader has a better grasp on those emotions and can form a better inderstanding. The story becomes more interesting for the reader. With an omniscent voice the view is more deistant and can become more confusing. You might relate an omniscent voice to God because He is all knowing and a reader is going to have a harder time relating to god than to another human being. Through an omniscent voice everything is laid out before the reader, which can become confusing. It's harder to keep things in perspective while a story is jumping around. It's also harder to hold the reader's attention with an omniscent voice. Everything is there for the readerto see, but with first person every turn is a surprise that keeps the reaqder on their toes. The reader only knows as much as the character. This will also bring the reader closer to the story and experience the feelings of the character.
Question 4) For Pride of Baghdad, I believe Vaughan's and Henrichon's purpose was to further victimize those killed during the Iraq bombing. the illustrations are graphic and the dialogue humanizes the animals and the U.S. soldiers appear over reactive and highly agressive. This brings me to think that they wanted the reader to take the side of the animals/all the Iraqi victims. They chose to publish this story as a GN because it really gets the point across. The illustrations of animals being killed and their frustrations speak volumes to a reader and they are strongly affected by what they see. The pictures combined with the bias text has a lot of power to sway a person. With this book the text can be bias because it comes out as the opinions of the animals so reader won't pick up on it as readily. the matter of the bombing in Iraq is a contraversial issue and I think the author and illustrator were interested in having a voice in the matter. They wanted people to see their view on things and perhaps sway their reader because this book is far from neutral. I think choosing the form of a GN had a lot to do with what they wanted to leave out and how they wanted to arrange it. In this story they wanted to say little and still be able to affect the reader, and a GN does just that. They give one simple line in the end of the book, "There were other casualties as well." This is a small bias remark that leaves a load of room for interpretation. The way they arraged it they're able to write a small amount and say a lot. With Pride of Baghdad I think Henrichon and Vaughan ran into the problem of being too bias. This book almost goes too far and I'm sure they actually modified it from its original form. The pictures do a lot of the talking so it was wise that they left the dialogue short. I think this could become a new form of persuasive writng that is very effective. The art in this book is very compelling. It was wise to choose bright colors for the illustrations because it draws the reader's attention and makes a strong statement. It runs similar to a movie and the style is reminiscent of a cartoon, such as The Lion King. I think this also makes the book more interesting.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Pride of Baghdad
History
Well this is by far the most graphic GN I have read this quarter, even more so than The 9/11 Report and quite a bit more disturbing. The intriguing part is that it is also a true story about a pack of lions that escaped from the Baghdad zoo during the American bombing in Iraq. It raises a lot of interesting thoughts and themes that hold true in the world today. During the story the pack of lions encounter other wild animals that recall the past war to describe what is going on now.
Objective
The illustrations in this GN are extremely detailed and flashy with vibrant colors. They make each scene stand out. The gutters vary and on some pages you might say there aren't any gutters because there is an illustration taking up the whole page with maybe one or two panels on top of it. The dialogue between the lions works well and you get a sense of each lion's personality.
Subjective
I really enjoyed this story, it was different from any other that I've read. I like the way the author developed the characters, it makes the story deeper and creates more connections and conflicts between the lions. The pictures at times were a bit disturbing ans shocking. Some of them were definitely a surprise when I turned the page and not necessarily a good one. The story is sad, but does an excellent job in showing the brutalities of war.
Themes
A theme I saw in this book was how war can destroy friendships and destroy people mentally. When having to fend for themselves amongst the war, the lions become more agressive with one another and their is a lot of anger and arguing that goes on, that you didn't see when they were in the zoo. I think it depicts the carelesness of Americans and the shoot first think later philosophy which seems to be growing here.
Connections
I think these lions along with all the other animals that died are an example of all the innocent people that have been killed during the fighting in Iraq. I think the soldiers show how reckless and honestly stupid the Americans can be. The one soldier who shoots the lions say the Safa just starting to charge so he felt the need, but didn't want to kill him. Yet Safa was not the first one killed, Zill was, who was peacefully enjoying the sunset, so once again ignorance and not being able to take responsibility for ones actions added up to more killing then necessary, hence
Well this is by far the most graphic GN I have read this quarter, even more so than The 9/11 Report and quite a bit more disturbing. The intriguing part is that it is also a true story about a pack of lions that escaped from the Baghdad zoo during the American bombing in Iraq. It raises a lot of interesting thoughts and themes that hold true in the world today. During the story the pack of lions encounter other wild animals that recall the past war to describe what is going on now.
Objective
The illustrations in this GN are extremely detailed and flashy with vibrant colors. They make each scene stand out. The gutters vary and on some pages you might say there aren't any gutters because there is an illustration taking up the whole page with maybe one or two panels on top of it. The dialogue between the lions works well and you get a sense of each lion's personality.
Subjective
I really enjoyed this story, it was different from any other that I've read. I like the way the author developed the characters, it makes the story deeper and creates more connections and conflicts between the lions. The pictures at times were a bit disturbing ans shocking. Some of them were definitely a surprise when I turned the page and not necessarily a good one. The story is sad, but does an excellent job in showing the brutalities of war.
Themes
A theme I saw in this book was how war can destroy friendships and destroy people mentally. When having to fend for themselves amongst the war, the lions become more agressive with one another and their is a lot of anger and arguing that goes on, that you didn't see when they were in the zoo. I think it depicts the carelesness of Americans and the shoot first think later philosophy which seems to be growing here.
Connections
I think these lions along with all the other animals that died are an example of all the innocent people that have been killed during the fighting in Iraq. I think the soldiers show how reckless and honestly stupid the Americans can be. The one soldier who shoots the lions say the Safa just starting to charge so he felt the need, but didn't want to kill him. Yet Safa was not the first one killed, Zill was, who was peacefully enjoying the sunset, so once again ignorance and not being able to take responsibility for ones actions added up to more killing then necessary, hence
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Imagetext Post: Roundtable on Lost Girls
What Lost Girls is varies according to perspective: among other things, it is an explication (and alteration) of the sexual undercurrents in the famous works of children's literature that it appropriates, a series of connections that Kenneth Kidd makes visible; a completely coherent part of Alan Moore's oeuvre as a comics writer, a continuity that Charles Hatfield demonstrates; and, a work in dialogue with both history and contemporary culture in many ways, as Meredith Collins shows. While agreeing with all three, I find it most important that Lost Girls is a sexually explicit work, and one that is intended to be sexually gratifying. Moore describes it as "intelligent pornography," a concept he clarifies in an interview with Bill Baker: "we have tried to do something which is accessible to both men and women, something that is not morally ugly, that is intelligent" (Baker 35).
2
What is the difference between pornography and other work containing sexually explicit content? It seems simple – pornographic and "erotic" work (the latter being a term generally reserved for prose and poetry) is offered specifically, though by no means exclusively, for sexual stimulation and pleasure, the same way other genres are offered for more nebulous goals, such as education, moral edification or "entertainment." Popular culture offers up (heteronormative) titillation in truckloads, and bad sex – "bad" in the sense of being unpleasurable for the characters, deliberately unaesthetic in description or even calculated to repulse the reader is common enough in "highbrow" literature.
3
I think it is significant that Lost Girls is a work of love, sex, and relationships in its creation, much like another one of comics' great story driven pornographies, Omaha the Cat Dancer, a character-driven melodrama notable for its anthropomorphic ("furry") characters. The human warmth and sexual heat of Omaha derives from the relationship of its creators, Kate Worley and Reed Waller, and the series declines after their breakup. Similarly, it is the decades long and continuing relationship of Moore and Gebbie that fuels the largely "good sex" narrative of Lost Girls.
4
Omaha is a carefully sex-positive book, in which sex is only and always depicted as healthy and normal, and sexual repression is decried as harmful. The only true perverts in the series are those who attempt to force their sexual mores on others. Lost Girls, unlike Omaha, acknowledges human sexuality as dark and troubled territory, especially for its early 20th century heroines. This form of honesty, jarring at times in conjunction with Gebbie's consistently beautiful colored pencils, is highly unusual in erotic/pornographic work, as it deflates sexual pleasure.
5
At the same time, exactly because of this introduction of credible difficulties and suffering both at the hands of sexual abusers (in scenes which are pointedly non-eroticized), and suffering as a more general result of being a woman and being a sexual being in the book's setting, Lost Girls becomes the rarest of pornographic works – one that tries to be ethically acceptable and appealing to progressive and even radical liberal readers, as well as to queers of almost all orientations. This is not to say that it deserves or will receive unconditional acceptance from scholarly readers – Hatfield offers an important critique of Lost Girls on the basis of its categorical valorization of imagination and its ambivalence regarding truth and fiction.
6
All pornography is philosophy, as it must assume or fundamentally redefine what power, pleasure, gender and the human are, and Lost Girls is no exception. In his introduction to volume 5 of The Collected Omaha, Neil Gaiman says that that Omaha is "simply a story where the cameras continue to roll while people take their clothes off and make love [...] making one wonder where all the sex has gone in the other fictions one reads or hears or sees." (5) He also claims that Omaha is "neither erotica nor pornography," (5) which is not entirely disingenuous, as the guiding philosophy of that book is that sex is normal (perhaps inevitable) and capable of being either deeply meaningful or casually pleasurable. Lost Girls is too sex-centric and otherworldly to allow for such a reading: it takes the other tact, elevating even casual sex to a plane of deep significance over and over again, making it the fundament and cement of identity and social relations – and, in doing so, producing an ethic and aesthetic that can only be described as a magical realism of the fuck.
7
Lost Girls cultivates this magical realism of the fuck both in literary and occult senses – the former emerges most clearly in the way Lost Girls lacks fantastic elements of the sort that characterize Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. Instead of magic spells, physical transformations, and other worlds, Lost Girls has sex. Sex is magical, sacred, transformative in Lost Girls: if Peter Pan is a homeless boy who seduces Wendy, and Captain Hook a predatory pedophile with a crippled hand, it is the magic of sex and intertext that gives Wendy's story a transcendent pathos and a sexual heat that allows both Wendy and the reader to overcome the sordid guilt of the tale. The fantasy and the mundane are each lost in the wonder and terror of sexual discovery. Though some may consider this a perversion, Wendy's story in Lost Girls is much less creepy than the original because the subterranean sexual foment of Peter Pan is brought to the surface to be considered, its pleasures celebrated, and its pains mourned and healed. However, as Kidd points out, Moore and Gebbie have straightened out the story, denying the intense male homoeroticism of the original.
8
Alice's and Dorothy's stories are transformed with less difficulty, but this magic is not confined to the lost girls' sexual histories. It is just as much a quality of the present of the narrative: the strange prescient time right before the start of World War I, the fantastic château with its uniformly oversexed staff, even the metanarrative relationship between the obscene little white book of "fabulous fakes" in every room of the château and the physical instance of the erotic pastiches in Lost Girls. There is a pornographic magic to the intensity and resilience of every character's libido, to the suspension of normal decency in favor of a world in which observation is dependent on desire, and a good fuck has the ritual power to not only ease minds but to unwind past traumas and heal injured souls. Some of the sex scenes, including a fabulous ménage a trois in a theater box are situated such that they pass over, just barely over, into the imaginary or the magical. Others, such as the congress of Wendy's and her husband's shadows, in defiance of their nearly sexless relationship, are truly magical and not merely anticipatory.
9
Collins says of the sex in Lost Girls that "it is crucial not only that sex can hurt or heal, but that these characters are more than appropriately-orificed mannequins." She is correct on both points, but her association of sex as healing with Freud is, though historically apropos, problematic if considered in terms of the work that the book does. There is a key similarity here between the sense of work in the occult sense, as Moore has used the term to describe a spell or ritual, and the Deleuzian anti-Oedipal sense, in which the book's work is the product of the assemblage of desire within. Both these conceptions of work are productive and social, unlike the Freudian understanding which is characterized by perpetual lack.
10
All of Moore's recent comics and other texts that are intended to function as magical "workings" or rituals, perform the work of making something metaphysically real though a work of imagination and communication, as with the culminatory "there because we say She is" that births the Angel Highbury at the end of his psychogeographic spoken-word piece, The Highbury Working. Here I have to note a point of disagreement with Hatfield, who compares Lost Girls mostly to Moore's early work, especially the "sex" issue of Swamp Thing. In doing so, he slights the directional shift that occurs in Moore with his declaration (after Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and Watchmen) that he has become a practicing magician.
11
Lost Girls is an extended work of sex magic – the second aspect of the magical realism of the fuck, or the "real magic of the fuck," if you will. And it may be Moore's best work of this period, in no small part because it has the self confidence to simply do magic rather than explain magic, as in Promethea and, to a lesser degree, From Hell. The story is structured as pornography – with a new strokeworthy scenario never more than a few pages away – but it is also structured as a magic ritual that uses the reader as much as it serves him or her.
12
The three principle characters of Lost Girls are framed as if they were the female leads of Lewis Carroll's, J.M. Barrie's and Frank L. Baum's stories, but they are not. Each one tells the others her own sexual history in ways that frequently allude to those stories, and Gebbie's art depicts these histories "realistically" at times and in the full crazed regalia and style of Alice in Wonderland et al. at others. But none of those stories exist in the world of Lost Girls, so there is no internal motivation for these allusions. Lost Girls is not an adaptation; it hardly even seems fair to call it an appropriation. It is an evocation[1] – a shamanic activity that links these injured characters to powerful stories with happy endings. Much of what has happened to Alice, Wendy and Dorothy is, in mundane terms, traumatic, sordid, and even nightmarish. The White Rabbit is a predatory pedophile, as is Hook, and the Wizard of Oz is hardly better, being less pedophilic and less predatory, but also Dorothy's own father.
13
The lost girls are just that – lost, hurt, broken in various ways. Alice, who has arguably suffered the most, has only recently been released from confinement in an asylum. So, where in Lost Girls does the generally positive and hopeful atmosphere, the characters' ability to surmount their past trauma, come from? It is latent in Gebbie's art style, but it comes in part from the very same familiar children's stories that the book subverts. Again, neither Peter Pan nor any of those other stories exist in this diegesis. The power of those stories exists for the characters but only in the reader. The power that heals the characters in Lost Girls, that makes their healing credible, is the power of the reader's belief in The Wizard of Oz, as well as in Alice and Wendy's stories. This is not as radical a reading as it must at first seem. A basic dictum of chaos magic, a school of occultism that has influenced Moore, is that there is no functional difference between a god and a beloved character, between a spell and a powerful idea.
14
Moore does not hesitate to consider fictions as real – it is practically axiomatic in his recent work that the characters are intended as "true fictions." They are real to us, and we are real to them – the point is made with variable degrees of subtlety and lack thereof repeatedly in Promethea, as, for example, in Promethea: Book 3 when the god Hermes says to Promethea "I'm saying that some fictions might have a real God hiding beneath the surface of the page. I'm saying that some fictions might be alive..." (72). Comfortable, happily-ever-after associations of the stories of Alice, Wendy and Dorothy, a set of associations that does not exist in Lost Girls, is a strength that the characters must draw from the reader.
15
This healing takes its course through a lot of sex and a lot of frank discussion. If the "sex magic" emotional healing of the characters in Lost Girls draws its power from a source in the reader, the book is also a ritual to heal the reader of sexual trauma, to convince us, to awkwardly paraphrase of the words of Marvin Gaye, that sex is something that's good for us. In Lost Girls' appeal to politically liberal-minded readers, good sex is divorced from shame and guilt. Similarly, traumatic, harmful or forced sex is divorced from pleasure. Unlike Victorian erotica, mainstream American pornography, and Japanese hentai, where rape, thinly veiled rape, or other forms of coercive sex are often presented as both pleasurable for the victim and eroticized for the scopophilic pleasure of the consumer, the only acceptable reason for sexual intercourse in Lost Girls is a mutual "want to," and that mutual "want to" is treated as the only justification necessary to do whatever is mutually desired.
16
One such scene contains a beautifully seductive double narrative of male homosexuality pairing Harold, Wendy's English husband, and Rolf, Dorothy's sometimes-lover, a Prussian soldier, alongside one of the book's many erotic pastiches, this one seemingly written by Oscar Wilde and illustrated by Egon Schiele. A more shocking scene comes from Wendy's memory: she "plays mother to" (jerks off) all of the lost boys, apparently as foreplay with Peter. As a magician, Moore knows the power of taboo – and of taboo breaking. Moore and Gebbie break certain taboos, and draw the lines of others, in the name of sex as a healthy, healing practice.
17
The mutual "want to" acts as a magical law, similar to Aleister Crowley's "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" and even nearer to the Wiccan adaptation thereof: "An it harm none, do what thou wilt." Moore and Gebbie's formulation becomes "an they want to, do who thou wants to." Thus, normally (or perhaps nominally) heterosexual characters have homosexual sex, and even the story's only committed homosexual character, Alice, engages in sexual activity with a man – allowing him to eat her out before penetrating him with a strap-on. In Lost Girls, bisexuality of some degree is the norm among men and women: in accordance to the magical law, it must be for anyone capable of desiring members of both sexes.
18
Childhood sexuality also becomes necessarily permissible, so long as one admits that sexual desire does not wait for a legal coming-of-age. All masturbatory fantasies, even those of rape, are necessarily permissible, as with Wendy's fantasizing about being captured by Hook and his crew, while actual rape is equally intolerable, as when Wendy is actually threatened by the hook-handed pedophile. Even Dorothy's incestuous relationship with her father is allowed, and presented as pleasurable – at first. The caveat to the law of mutual "want to" comes in the way that true libertinism can destroy relationships and scar psyches – Dorothy's relationships to her father and stepmother are irreparably damaged. Dorothy suffers the consequences of her actions, but the new taboo against repression is stronger than the old one against incest. Conversely, the consequences of lawbreaking are staggering: Lost Girls posits a uniquely male tendency to sublimate sex into violence as the cause of WWI. Harold and Rolf are judged harshly because each puts his national loyalty ahead of their mutual desire for each other. Given how much spontaneous sex the new law of the mutual "want to" results in, it would be a miracle that no-one in Lost Girls becomes pregnant or contracts a disease, but that is one taboo of the pornography genre that Moore and Gebbie elect not to break. Collins rightly points out that some attention is given to preventing pregnancy, a step up from most Victorian erotica.
19
In the end, Lost Girls is exactly what it sets out to be – an outstanding and cerebral fuckbook. What sets it apart as "intelligent" pornography is not what it does outside of titillate, but what it seeks to titillate; not what it is outside of sex, but what it finds in sex. It is indiscernible and probably irrelevant whether sex is intended as a line of flight to somewhere else or if sex is intended to become purely sex. It works as both a therapeutic redemption though sex and as a redemption of sex and pornography, to the degree that it works at all. Whether it works is, as with all pornography and all philosophy, a matter of the audience's desires, sexual and otherwise.
Comments
I found this article quite intriguing. I have never heard of the book or seen it, but it clearly seems to carry a large amount of explicit content. Some are categorizing Lost Girls as pornography, but i beg to differ. This article explains that the book shows how sex can be healing or harmful within the context of the story. To label this as pornography would be too harsh. It would be like calling romance novels pornography, and I can make a fair judgement on this; I am an avid romance reader and writer and words can be just as explicit as pictures. The other aspect of this book, is that from the sounds of it, it's not just sex, their is a story or stories involving plot, problems, resolutions and character development, and within the story there is sex. In my mind all these factors place Lost Girls far from the pornography section.
2
What is the difference between pornography and other work containing sexually explicit content? It seems simple – pornographic and "erotic" work (the latter being a term generally reserved for prose and poetry) is offered specifically, though by no means exclusively, for sexual stimulation and pleasure, the same way other genres are offered for more nebulous goals, such as education, moral edification or "entertainment." Popular culture offers up (heteronormative) titillation in truckloads, and bad sex – "bad" in the sense of being unpleasurable for the characters, deliberately unaesthetic in description or even calculated to repulse the reader is common enough in "highbrow" literature.
3
I think it is significant that Lost Girls is a work of love, sex, and relationships in its creation, much like another one of comics' great story driven pornographies, Omaha the Cat Dancer, a character-driven melodrama notable for its anthropomorphic ("furry") characters. The human warmth and sexual heat of Omaha derives from the relationship of its creators, Kate Worley and Reed Waller, and the series declines after their breakup. Similarly, it is the decades long and continuing relationship of Moore and Gebbie that fuels the largely "good sex" narrative of Lost Girls.
4
Omaha is a carefully sex-positive book, in which sex is only and always depicted as healthy and normal, and sexual repression is decried as harmful. The only true perverts in the series are those who attempt to force their sexual mores on others. Lost Girls, unlike Omaha, acknowledges human sexuality as dark and troubled territory, especially for its early 20th century heroines. This form of honesty, jarring at times in conjunction with Gebbie's consistently beautiful colored pencils, is highly unusual in erotic/pornographic work, as it deflates sexual pleasure.
5
At the same time, exactly because of this introduction of credible difficulties and suffering both at the hands of sexual abusers (in scenes which are pointedly non-eroticized), and suffering as a more general result of being a woman and being a sexual being in the book's setting, Lost Girls becomes the rarest of pornographic works – one that tries to be ethically acceptable and appealing to progressive and even radical liberal readers, as well as to queers of almost all orientations. This is not to say that it deserves or will receive unconditional acceptance from scholarly readers – Hatfield offers an important critique of Lost Girls on the basis of its categorical valorization of imagination and its ambivalence regarding truth and fiction.
6
All pornography is philosophy, as it must assume or fundamentally redefine what power, pleasure, gender and the human are, and Lost Girls is no exception. In his introduction to volume 5 of The Collected Omaha, Neil Gaiman says that that Omaha is "simply a story where the cameras continue to roll while people take their clothes off and make love [...] making one wonder where all the sex has gone in the other fictions one reads or hears or sees." (5) He also claims that Omaha is "neither erotica nor pornography," (5) which is not entirely disingenuous, as the guiding philosophy of that book is that sex is normal (perhaps inevitable) and capable of being either deeply meaningful or casually pleasurable. Lost Girls is too sex-centric and otherworldly to allow for such a reading: it takes the other tact, elevating even casual sex to a plane of deep significance over and over again, making it the fundament and cement of identity and social relations – and, in doing so, producing an ethic and aesthetic that can only be described as a magical realism of the fuck.
7
Lost Girls cultivates this magical realism of the fuck both in literary and occult senses – the former emerges most clearly in the way Lost Girls lacks fantastic elements of the sort that characterize Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. Instead of magic spells, physical transformations, and other worlds, Lost Girls has sex. Sex is magical, sacred, transformative in Lost Girls: if Peter Pan is a homeless boy who seduces Wendy, and Captain Hook a predatory pedophile with a crippled hand, it is the magic of sex and intertext that gives Wendy's story a transcendent pathos and a sexual heat that allows both Wendy and the reader to overcome the sordid guilt of the tale. The fantasy and the mundane are each lost in the wonder and terror of sexual discovery. Though some may consider this a perversion, Wendy's story in Lost Girls is much less creepy than the original because the subterranean sexual foment of Peter Pan is brought to the surface to be considered, its pleasures celebrated, and its pains mourned and healed. However, as Kidd points out, Moore and Gebbie have straightened out the story, denying the intense male homoeroticism of the original.
8
Alice's and Dorothy's stories are transformed with less difficulty, but this magic is not confined to the lost girls' sexual histories. It is just as much a quality of the present of the narrative: the strange prescient time right before the start of World War I, the fantastic château with its uniformly oversexed staff, even the metanarrative relationship between the obscene little white book of "fabulous fakes" in every room of the château and the physical instance of the erotic pastiches in Lost Girls. There is a pornographic magic to the intensity and resilience of every character's libido, to the suspension of normal decency in favor of a world in which observation is dependent on desire, and a good fuck has the ritual power to not only ease minds but to unwind past traumas and heal injured souls. Some of the sex scenes, including a fabulous ménage a trois in a theater box are situated such that they pass over, just barely over, into the imaginary or the magical. Others, such as the congress of Wendy's and her husband's shadows, in defiance of their nearly sexless relationship, are truly magical and not merely anticipatory.
9
Collins says of the sex in Lost Girls that "it is crucial not only that sex can hurt or heal, but that these characters are more than appropriately-orificed mannequins." She is correct on both points, but her association of sex as healing with Freud is, though historically apropos, problematic if considered in terms of the work that the book does. There is a key similarity here between the sense of work in the occult sense, as Moore has used the term to describe a spell or ritual, and the Deleuzian anti-Oedipal sense, in which the book's work is the product of the assemblage of desire within. Both these conceptions of work are productive and social, unlike the Freudian understanding which is characterized by perpetual lack.
10
All of Moore's recent comics and other texts that are intended to function as magical "workings" or rituals, perform the work of making something metaphysically real though a work of imagination and communication, as with the culminatory "there because we say She is" that births the Angel Highbury at the end of his psychogeographic spoken-word piece, The Highbury Working. Here I have to note a point of disagreement with Hatfield, who compares Lost Girls mostly to Moore's early work, especially the "sex" issue of Swamp Thing. In doing so, he slights the directional shift that occurs in Moore with his declaration (after Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and Watchmen) that he has become a practicing magician.
11
Lost Girls is an extended work of sex magic – the second aspect of the magical realism of the fuck, or the "real magic of the fuck," if you will. And it may be Moore's best work of this period, in no small part because it has the self confidence to simply do magic rather than explain magic, as in Promethea and, to a lesser degree, From Hell. The story is structured as pornography – with a new strokeworthy scenario never more than a few pages away – but it is also structured as a magic ritual that uses the reader as much as it serves him or her.
12
The three principle characters of Lost Girls are framed as if they were the female leads of Lewis Carroll's, J.M. Barrie's and Frank L. Baum's stories, but they are not. Each one tells the others her own sexual history in ways that frequently allude to those stories, and Gebbie's art depicts these histories "realistically" at times and in the full crazed regalia and style of Alice in Wonderland et al. at others. But none of those stories exist in the world of Lost Girls, so there is no internal motivation for these allusions. Lost Girls is not an adaptation; it hardly even seems fair to call it an appropriation. It is an evocation[1] – a shamanic activity that links these injured characters to powerful stories with happy endings. Much of what has happened to Alice, Wendy and Dorothy is, in mundane terms, traumatic, sordid, and even nightmarish. The White Rabbit is a predatory pedophile, as is Hook, and the Wizard of Oz is hardly better, being less pedophilic and less predatory, but also Dorothy's own father.
13
The lost girls are just that – lost, hurt, broken in various ways. Alice, who has arguably suffered the most, has only recently been released from confinement in an asylum. So, where in Lost Girls does the generally positive and hopeful atmosphere, the characters' ability to surmount their past trauma, come from? It is latent in Gebbie's art style, but it comes in part from the very same familiar children's stories that the book subverts. Again, neither Peter Pan nor any of those other stories exist in this diegesis. The power of those stories exists for the characters but only in the reader. The power that heals the characters in Lost Girls, that makes their healing credible, is the power of the reader's belief in The Wizard of Oz, as well as in Alice and Wendy's stories. This is not as radical a reading as it must at first seem. A basic dictum of chaos magic, a school of occultism that has influenced Moore, is that there is no functional difference between a god and a beloved character, between a spell and a powerful idea.
14
Moore does not hesitate to consider fictions as real – it is practically axiomatic in his recent work that the characters are intended as "true fictions." They are real to us, and we are real to them – the point is made with variable degrees of subtlety and lack thereof repeatedly in Promethea, as, for example, in Promethea: Book 3 when the god Hermes says to Promethea "I'm saying that some fictions might have a real God hiding beneath the surface of the page. I'm saying that some fictions might be alive..." (72). Comfortable, happily-ever-after associations of the stories of Alice, Wendy and Dorothy, a set of associations that does not exist in Lost Girls, is a strength that the characters must draw from the reader.
15
This healing takes its course through a lot of sex and a lot of frank discussion. If the "sex magic" emotional healing of the characters in Lost Girls draws its power from a source in the reader, the book is also a ritual to heal the reader of sexual trauma, to convince us, to awkwardly paraphrase of the words of Marvin Gaye, that sex is something that's good for us. In Lost Girls' appeal to politically liberal-minded readers, good sex is divorced from shame and guilt. Similarly, traumatic, harmful or forced sex is divorced from pleasure. Unlike Victorian erotica, mainstream American pornography, and Japanese hentai, where rape, thinly veiled rape, or other forms of coercive sex are often presented as both pleasurable for the victim and eroticized for the scopophilic pleasure of the consumer, the only acceptable reason for sexual intercourse in Lost Girls is a mutual "want to," and that mutual "want to" is treated as the only justification necessary to do whatever is mutually desired.
16
One such scene contains a beautifully seductive double narrative of male homosexuality pairing Harold, Wendy's English husband, and Rolf, Dorothy's sometimes-lover, a Prussian soldier, alongside one of the book's many erotic pastiches, this one seemingly written by Oscar Wilde and illustrated by Egon Schiele. A more shocking scene comes from Wendy's memory: she "plays mother to" (jerks off) all of the lost boys, apparently as foreplay with Peter. As a magician, Moore knows the power of taboo – and of taboo breaking. Moore and Gebbie break certain taboos, and draw the lines of others, in the name of sex as a healthy, healing practice.
17
The mutual "want to" acts as a magical law, similar to Aleister Crowley's "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" and even nearer to the Wiccan adaptation thereof: "An it harm none, do what thou wilt." Moore and Gebbie's formulation becomes "an they want to, do who thou wants to." Thus, normally (or perhaps nominally) heterosexual characters have homosexual sex, and even the story's only committed homosexual character, Alice, engages in sexual activity with a man – allowing him to eat her out before penetrating him with a strap-on. In Lost Girls, bisexuality of some degree is the norm among men and women: in accordance to the magical law, it must be for anyone capable of desiring members of both sexes.
18
Childhood sexuality also becomes necessarily permissible, so long as one admits that sexual desire does not wait for a legal coming-of-age. All masturbatory fantasies, even those of rape, are necessarily permissible, as with Wendy's fantasizing about being captured by Hook and his crew, while actual rape is equally intolerable, as when Wendy is actually threatened by the hook-handed pedophile. Even Dorothy's incestuous relationship with her father is allowed, and presented as pleasurable – at first. The caveat to the law of mutual "want to" comes in the way that true libertinism can destroy relationships and scar psyches – Dorothy's relationships to her father and stepmother are irreparably damaged. Dorothy suffers the consequences of her actions, but the new taboo against repression is stronger than the old one against incest. Conversely, the consequences of lawbreaking are staggering: Lost Girls posits a uniquely male tendency to sublimate sex into violence as the cause of WWI. Harold and Rolf are judged harshly because each puts his national loyalty ahead of their mutual desire for each other. Given how much spontaneous sex the new law of the mutual "want to" results in, it would be a miracle that no-one in Lost Girls becomes pregnant or contracts a disease, but that is one taboo of the pornography genre that Moore and Gebbie elect not to break. Collins rightly points out that some attention is given to preventing pregnancy, a step up from most Victorian erotica.
19
In the end, Lost Girls is exactly what it sets out to be – an outstanding and cerebral fuckbook. What sets it apart as "intelligent" pornography is not what it does outside of titillate, but what it seeks to titillate; not what it is outside of sex, but what it finds in sex. It is indiscernible and probably irrelevant whether sex is intended as a line of flight to somewhere else or if sex is intended to become purely sex. It works as both a therapeutic redemption though sex and as a redemption of sex and pornography, to the degree that it works at all. Whether it works is, as with all pornography and all philosophy, a matter of the audience's desires, sexual and otherwise.
Comments
I found this article quite intriguing. I have never heard of the book or seen it, but it clearly seems to carry a large amount of explicit content. Some are categorizing Lost Girls as pornography, but i beg to differ. This article explains that the book shows how sex can be healing or harmful within the context of the story. To label this as pornography would be too harsh. It would be like calling romance novels pornography, and I can make a fair judgement on this; I am an avid romance reader and writer and words can be just as explicit as pictures. The other aspect of this book, is that from the sounds of it, it's not just sex, their is a story or stories involving plot, problems, resolutions and character development, and within the story there is sex. In my mind all these factors place Lost Girls far from the pornography section.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
The Golem's Mighty Swing
Summary
The Golem's Mighty Swing takes place around the 30's or 40's when baseball was still young. A baseball team of Jews travels the U.S. in a rickety bus playing games on a daily basis. They arrive in a town called Putnam, where they're greeted with hostility from the town folk. They're going to play against some of the best known baseball players. An agent gets in touch with them and tells them that with a substantial amount of money he can turn their team into a jackpot and make them popular. He comes up with the idea of creating an icon for their team so that they will be recognizable. The idea is to take their biggest player, who is a monster of a man, and dress him up in the bulky suit and shadow his face with a big wig to make him stand out and look intimidating. At first it seems like a good way to make more money so they accept the offer. In the end, their pitcher gets beat to a pulp in a bar and he can't play in the game and as they're able to turn the game around so that they're winning the crowd becomes hostile and breaks into the field creating a fiasco. The Jews are able to sneak out and escape the town without getting hurt, except for their pitcher.
Insight
One aspect of this story that really intrigued me was the creation of the Golemand the illustration of him. I don't even understand where someone would come up with that crazy idea. The Golem could have looked like anything and for some reason the agent thought he should be large, invasive and menacing. What is interesting though is that the effects of the Golem were similar to its features. After the creation of the Golem, more attention was brought to the team, but it was negative. The crowds became larger as well as menacing, and dangerous. During the game the Golem takes the field to pitch and suddenly the crowd is in a uproar yelling at them. In retaliation the Golem pitches the ball and hits the batter in the head. Suddenly the crowd is in the field attempting to tear the Jews apart, but they retreat to the dug out where the police refuse to let the public touch them. I think that the outcome is a reflection of the Golem. As soon as you bring more publicity to the matter you get a bigger reaction in this case violent. Things become more complicated and controversial. It's better to just be old fashioned and stick with the old ways. Bigger and better is most time bigger and messier.
The Golem's Mighty Swing takes place around the 30's or 40's when baseball was still young. A baseball team of Jews travels the U.S. in a rickety bus playing games on a daily basis. They arrive in a town called Putnam, where they're greeted with hostility from the town folk. They're going to play against some of the best known baseball players. An agent gets in touch with them and tells them that with a substantial amount of money he can turn their team into a jackpot and make them popular. He comes up with the idea of creating an icon for their team so that they will be recognizable. The idea is to take their biggest player, who is a monster of a man, and dress him up in the bulky suit and shadow his face with a big wig to make him stand out and look intimidating. At first it seems like a good way to make more money so they accept the offer. In the end, their pitcher gets beat to a pulp in a bar and he can't play in the game and as they're able to turn the game around so that they're winning the crowd becomes hostile and breaks into the field creating a fiasco. The Jews are able to sneak out and escape the town without getting hurt, except for their pitcher.
Insight
One aspect of this story that really intrigued me was the creation of the Golemand the illustration of him. I don't even understand where someone would come up with that crazy idea. The Golem could have looked like anything and for some reason the agent thought he should be large, invasive and menacing. What is interesting though is that the effects of the Golem were similar to its features. After the creation of the Golem, more attention was brought to the team, but it was negative. The crowds became larger as well as menacing, and dangerous. During the game the Golem takes the field to pitch and suddenly the crowd is in a uproar yelling at them. In retaliation the Golem pitches the ball and hits the batter in the head. Suddenly the crowd is in the field attempting to tear the Jews apart, but they retreat to the dug out where the police refuse to let the public touch them. I think that the outcome is a reflection of the Golem. As soon as you bring more publicity to the matter you get a bigger reaction in this case violent. Things become more complicated and controversial. It's better to just be old fashioned and stick with the old ways. Bigger and better is most time bigger and messier.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
From Far Away
Summary
I young japanese girl in high school living an innocent and charming life stumbles upon a bomb planted by a terrorist just as it explodes. This girl with a wild imagination wakes up and finds herself in a far away land. Dazed and confused she is found by a mysterious warrior that reluctantly allows her to come along with him. He speaks a language she doesn't understand causing her to feel farther away from home and their travels to be more awkward. She finds the warrior heroic and amazing, and he finds her to be slightly off kilter and annoying at times. It isn't made clear as to where she ended up, but their is a rather large search for something called the awakening. Many men are searching for it and want to destroy, and Izark, the warrior, believes Noriko, the girl, to be it. On their journey, their destination unkonwn, Noriko matures and begins to pick up on Izark's language, bringing them closer.
History
The story begins and current day Japan, but when Noriko is transported to this unearthly world, it seems as if she travels back in time. The characters travel by foot or horse and buggy. They engage in face to face combat with swords and the environment looks primitive like a jungle. Their clothing consists of long tunics or wrap around dresses. Their shoes are made of leather and wrap up to the knee. Most of the characters including the men have long hair and all the men wear a belt with a scabbard.
Objective
This GN is written in an entertainment style. The pictures are black and white, but there are exciting fight scenes with flashy words to emphasize noises. The gutters are sporadic and range from large to non-existant. Some of the pages consist of only one picture bringing drama to that scene. The artistic style has a mystical feeling. The Clothing and background are well detailed but the faces are often partially covered by hair and in the shadows with only an outline. In places when the artist wanted to show a response the emotions are vivdly displayed so as not to misinterpret the character's reaction or opinion.
Subjective
This book certainly makes for an enjoyable read and was quite the page turner. No doubt I will be reading the next volume. The flashy art really grabbed my attention and the pictures are enticing. The writing to me does lack a little. I think it could be improved to help develop the characters, but the illustrations do make up for that.
Connections
Niroko is an average modern day high school student who is thrown into a face paced exotic foreign world and I think her reaction is similar to that of any strong girl these days. Among all three graphic novels I have each one has a strong portrayal of the culture with which it was written and illustrated. The 9/11 Report was bold and flashy with some rash accusations. Each character was dramatic and stood out, and I think often times that is the life style of Americans. Monsieur Lambert is simplistic and refined, and very male driven in it's dialogue. From Far Away is mystical and portrays the girl as being clueless, innocent and submissive.
I young japanese girl in high school living an innocent and charming life stumbles upon a bomb planted by a terrorist just as it explodes. This girl with a wild imagination wakes up and finds herself in a far away land. Dazed and confused she is found by a mysterious warrior that reluctantly allows her to come along with him. He speaks a language she doesn't understand causing her to feel farther away from home and their travels to be more awkward. She finds the warrior heroic and amazing, and he finds her to be slightly off kilter and annoying at times. It isn't made clear as to where she ended up, but their is a rather large search for something called the awakening. Many men are searching for it and want to destroy, and Izark, the warrior, believes Noriko, the girl, to be it. On their journey, their destination unkonwn, Noriko matures and begins to pick up on Izark's language, bringing them closer.
History
The story begins and current day Japan, but when Noriko is transported to this unearthly world, it seems as if she travels back in time. The characters travel by foot or horse and buggy. They engage in face to face combat with swords and the environment looks primitive like a jungle. Their clothing consists of long tunics or wrap around dresses. Their shoes are made of leather and wrap up to the knee. Most of the characters including the men have long hair and all the men wear a belt with a scabbard.
Objective
This GN is written in an entertainment style. The pictures are black and white, but there are exciting fight scenes with flashy words to emphasize noises. The gutters are sporadic and range from large to non-existant. Some of the pages consist of only one picture bringing drama to that scene. The artistic style has a mystical feeling. The Clothing and background are well detailed but the faces are often partially covered by hair and in the shadows with only an outline. In places when the artist wanted to show a response the emotions are vivdly displayed so as not to misinterpret the character's reaction or opinion.
Subjective
This book certainly makes for an enjoyable read and was quite the page turner. No doubt I will be reading the next volume. The flashy art really grabbed my attention and the pictures are enticing. The writing to me does lack a little. I think it could be improved to help develop the characters, but the illustrations do make up for that.
Connections
Niroko is an average modern day high school student who is thrown into a face paced exotic foreign world and I think her reaction is similar to that of any strong girl these days. Among all three graphic novels I have each one has a strong portrayal of the culture with which it was written and illustrated. The 9/11 Report was bold and flashy with some rash accusations. Each character was dramatic and stood out, and I think often times that is the life style of Americans. Monsieur Lambert is simplistic and refined, and very male driven in it's dialogue. From Far Away is mystical and portrays the girl as being clueless, innocent and submissive.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Mid-term
1) Describe the different art and writing styles of graphic novels you have examined so far. How are the styles similar and/ or different? You must use McCloud and your packet on literary terminology for this answer.
The two graphic novels I have read through so far, The 9/11 Report and Monsieur Lambert sit at completely opposite ends on the style spectrum. The 9/11 Report is bold ans structured with brightly colored illustrations. It evokes a sense of urgency and serious behavior in the reader. The main setting takes place in America, depicting the tragedy of September 11th, and then spands to many country following the history of terrorists up to the date of the twin towers. The book is a very opinionated sort of America against the world, and we must take action to protect out country.
On the other hand we have Monsieur Lambert, which takes place in a quainte cafe located in a small town outside of Paris. We don't ever see anything outside of the cafe and the story focuses on four gentlemen that come together for lunch everyday and discuss the past and present greates of football. The illustrations are loose and care-free, almost a lazy style is a simplistic black and white. The are no gutters so the story maintains a continuous flow with one main illustration using up the whole page as opposed to a bunch of rigid boxes with bubbles and gutters, such as in 9/11, which takes you to many more places allowing the reader much more closure.
Despite their differences. These two graphic novels do share a similarity. They each strongly depict the culture of the setting with which they take place. Like America, the pages of The 9/11 Report are busy with bright colors and bold text. In Monsieur Lambert the loose illustrations and simplistic nature of conversations in the book reflect the quite yet fullfilling lives of the French.
4) Choose one graphic novel and address the explicit/ implicit role that gender plays in the narrative (character, plot, narrative point of view) and in the genre (genre examples: superhero? Science fiction? Memoir?). Be sure to provide specific examples.
The graphic novel that I chose for this question is Monsieur Lambert. There narrative is strongly male driven throughout the story and also the characters express their views of women from a male point of view, which I find quite amusing. The role of gender in this grapic novel clearly presents the strong bond between male companions. When Lambert begins missing lunch or arriving late his friends embrace his good fortune and congratulate him, as opposed to shunning him for choosing a woman over them. A less noticable role of gender that is displayed in the narrative is the theme that we deny ourselves our true desires when they appear shallow or pointless to others. After Lambert stops seeing the mistory woman his friends simply say the women are useless and there's no point and football is what men can really count on. But at the end of the story Lambert begins seeing another woman and the men go right back into reminescing about the past romances and women are the only thing on their minds.
An idealistic part of gender role that shows up in this story is that your budies can pick you up out of any slump help you back on your feet in no time. Lambert only spends a few days after his first love miserable and sulking until his friends are able to bring him back around and they're all back to their discussion about football players as if nothing ever happened.
5) How do graphic novels not only address, but aid/ problematize our understanding of history? Are they even historical texts? Discuss how this representation of history from one of your graphic novel choices fit into the work of other graphic novelists. Are the representations similar/ different?
The 9/11 Report is an excellent example in showing how graphic novels aid a reader's understanding of history. The whole setting and structure of a graphic novel make it enjoyable for a reader. There are stylistic illustrations, colorful text and narrative that sends a reader on a adventure rich with imagery to help the imagination paint a more elaborate picture. In the 9/11 Report, the author combines this style with facts direct from the actual 9/11 Report to paint a vivid history of terrorism leading up to the twin towers attack, leaving the reader entertained and informed. While reading this graphic novel a reader is pulled in by the bold colors and gutters that require their own imagination to complete the picture, and may not even realize that what they are reading is true and factual. But just because they do not realize it is factual does not mean they will not pull useful information from this book, and after reading is they will have a stronger understanding of the events leading up the the 9/11 Report. The graphic novel The 9/11 Report is definitely a historical text.
The two graphic novels I have read through so far, The 9/11 Report and Monsieur Lambert sit at completely opposite ends on the style spectrum. The 9/11 Report is bold ans structured with brightly colored illustrations. It evokes a sense of urgency and serious behavior in the reader. The main setting takes place in America, depicting the tragedy of September 11th, and then spands to many country following the history of terrorists up to the date of the twin towers. The book is a very opinionated sort of America against the world, and we must take action to protect out country.
On the other hand we have Monsieur Lambert, which takes place in a quainte cafe located in a small town outside of Paris. We don't ever see anything outside of the cafe and the story focuses on four gentlemen that come together for lunch everyday and discuss the past and present greates of football. The illustrations are loose and care-free, almost a lazy style is a simplistic black and white. The are no gutters so the story maintains a continuous flow with one main illustration using up the whole page as opposed to a bunch of rigid boxes with bubbles and gutters, such as in 9/11, which takes you to many more places allowing the reader much more closure.
Despite their differences. These two graphic novels do share a similarity. They each strongly depict the culture of the setting with which they take place. Like America, the pages of The 9/11 Report are busy with bright colors and bold text. In Monsieur Lambert the loose illustrations and simplistic nature of conversations in the book reflect the quite yet fullfilling lives of the French.
4) Choose one graphic novel and address the explicit/ implicit role that gender plays in the narrative (character, plot, narrative point of view) and in the genre (genre examples: superhero? Science fiction? Memoir?). Be sure to provide specific examples.
The graphic novel that I chose for this question is Monsieur Lambert. There narrative is strongly male driven throughout the story and also the characters express their views of women from a male point of view, which I find quite amusing. The role of gender in this grapic novel clearly presents the strong bond between male companions. When Lambert begins missing lunch or arriving late his friends embrace his good fortune and congratulate him, as opposed to shunning him for choosing a woman over them. A less noticable role of gender that is displayed in the narrative is the theme that we deny ourselves our true desires when they appear shallow or pointless to others. After Lambert stops seeing the mistory woman his friends simply say the women are useless and there's no point and football is what men can really count on. But at the end of the story Lambert begins seeing another woman and the men go right back into reminescing about the past romances and women are the only thing on their minds.
An idealistic part of gender role that shows up in this story is that your budies can pick you up out of any slump help you back on your feet in no time. Lambert only spends a few days after his first love miserable and sulking until his friends are able to bring him back around and they're all back to their discussion about football players as if nothing ever happened.
5) How do graphic novels not only address, but aid/ problematize our understanding of history? Are they even historical texts? Discuss how this representation of history from one of your graphic novel choices fit into the work of other graphic novelists. Are the representations similar/ different?
The 9/11 Report is an excellent example in showing how graphic novels aid a reader's understanding of history. The whole setting and structure of a graphic novel make it enjoyable for a reader. There are stylistic illustrations, colorful text and narrative that sends a reader on a adventure rich with imagery to help the imagination paint a more elaborate picture. In the 9/11 Report, the author combines this style with facts direct from the actual 9/11 Report to paint a vivid history of terrorism leading up to the twin towers attack, leaving the reader entertained and informed. While reading this graphic novel a reader is pulled in by the bold colors and gutters that require their own imagination to complete the picture, and may not even realize that what they are reading is true and factual. But just because they do not realize it is factual does not mean they will not pull useful information from this book, and after reading is they will have a stronger understanding of the events leading up the the 9/11 Report. The graphic novel The 9/11 Report is definitely a historical text.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)