4th Blogiversary
Today, after what seems like months of build up, is Primary day in Pennsylvania. It’s also my 4th blogiversary.
Here are a few bits and pieces from the past year that might entice you to visit the archives:
On American Elf: “Comics is often spoken of as an art of subtraction or omission. What is left out in the breakdown of panels is as important as what is put in. American Elf is notable for what it does leave out: almost any reference to the repetitious moments of life, to the everyday…”
On Yukiko’s Spinach: “Boilet uses a number of tactics to create the first person perspective. He composes his panels in such a way that we see through his (or rather the author character’s) eyes. The compositional focus moves around in the panels like the unsteady eye of a human. For instance in these three panels we see Yukiko at dinner but unlike many comics (or film/tv) where we might see a steady unmoving view of the character as she talks, Boilet shifts the composition to recreate the appearance of his gaze wandering to her breasts, her face, the leg of a woman at the next table (Yukiko almost completely cropped off panel), the wine glasses…”
On Gray Horses: “Larson’s style is especially pleasing for the way she represented a plethora of normally unseen phenomena, such as sound, light, wind, thoughts. She uses traditional comics icons in singular ways that are evocative and effective…”
A list of ways music is represented in comics.
On Syncopated 3: “This displays an issue that should be considered in the genre of comics reportage. Conventional reportage offers only a few images and lots of text. Analysis, arguments, and other elements of reportage are in many cases difficult to convey with images, or at least narrative images of the conventional sort (what about graphs, charts, maps, etc.?). I think comics reportage may require thinking outside the constraints and conventions of fictional narration. Non-fiction in comics (particularly autobiography) is often broken down and drawn in a similar way to conventional fictional narrative, and that is probably to its detriment.”
On The Three Paradoxes: “In the end, the book as a whole embodies the theme too well: it exists between two gaps, neither her nor there. With all these building up of levels of narratives to showcase the theme of non-movement, the book itself doesn’t go anywhere. It’s fallen into a gap between form and content. The stylistic and thematic build-up is a grand display of virtuosity that feels empty once one delves beneath the surface.”
On Exit: “The high contrast is very noir-esque. Black tends to predominate on the page, aided by the use of black margins and gutters. The expansive blacks wipe out detail, leaving shapes. Similarly, detail is whited out like holes in the darkness. The art isn’t always as severe as I make it out to be, but that is the overwhelming feeling. Kanan’s style shifts through the volume (certainly due to the period of time over which it was drawn), sometimes as severe as that, sometimes using a few spare lines. Between the black and white is the hatching that acts at various times to provide depth, texture, tone, and structure to the images.”
On Trains are Mint: “As an autobiographical comic it is a refreshing change from the relationship comic (a la Jeffrey Brown), reminiscence of youth (a la Chester Brown) or the day-to-day slice of life (a la Kolchalka). For Trains Are Mint is as much about East as a person as it is about the places he walks through. In both cases it isn’t about much at all. I love it.”
On Floating Weeds: “Ozu makes much use of fore, mid, and background extensively. Something I noticed in particular is the use of a foreground object (often walls and buildings) to act as a screen behind which character enter and exit the frame. This tends to tighten the spaces in which the characters act.”
On Gasoline Alley: “In the endless everyday, there are always the days where we step outside the repetition, if only to find a new repetition in variety. Weekends bring a different repetition than our weekdays, and so does Frank King step outside the story and art of the Gasoline Alley dailies for the Sunday pages. The Sundays are both visually and narratively outside the dailies’ range, yet they maintain a certain sense of repetition, even in their stylistic and formal variance from the dailies.”
On Cotton Woods: “…it occurred to me how much Cotton Woods is like a superhero comic. Instead of fighting crime with amazing powers, Cotton plays ball with extraordinary skill. No one steals home as often, gets as many home runs, hits as well, or fields as successfully as he does to beat the enemy/other team. His sidekick Cyclone is not quite as amazing, but he’s close, lacking only the same intelligence as his partner. He’s got a regular, small cast of supporting characters, a few revolving opponents, and he even has a uniform. It’s probably a stretch, but it reads in that same black and white, simple answers style of older superhero comics.”
On The Golem’s Mighty Swing: “A few of Gotto’s visual tropes make their appearance–the large foreground baseballs, expressive silhouettes, and the scoreboard as a narrative method–but Sturm shows the game in a much different way. In a 100 page comic book format, Sturm has a lot more space to work with than Gotto’s four panel dailies. We see the result of this in the way parts of the game slowly unfold. An early at-bat by Mo lasts more than 3 pages (25 plus panels).”
You might also check out my Panels & Pictures columns at ComixTalk from the past year.
With that said, blogging will be slim through May. I have too many other projects going on right now both comics and non-comics related. Though I’ll try to keep updating my Notes blog and Things Change will be updated (albeit once a week instead of twice a week).
Tags: anniversary, best_of
3 Comments
Jump to comment form | comments rss [?]