It’s not often that I’m fooled by a book. There was James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, which fooled the majority of readers, including Oprah, into believing it was an autobiographical (nonfiction) account of his life as an alcoholic and drug addict. That was over ten years ago, so I guess I let down my guard a little since then. Now, along comes Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock
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I think there is a rule somewhere that if a person writes nine blog posts in a row that mostly focus on the intended subject, the tenth can contain a bit of rambling nonsense. If you’re reading my work, hopefully you’ll be invested enough to indulge me. I’m tired and a bit cranky, so I’m finally going to take a minute to rant about a problem I’ve been experiencing, which is the small writing found in Comics journalism, the use of the comics medium to report news stories and real-life events, is increasingly becoming a part of the mainstream media. According to The Economist, “it has been around for decades, kept alive by such talented artists as Joe Sacco, who has used the medium to depict everything from a war-torn town in the Gaza Strip to the Eastern Bosnian war.” Comics
I often ask my friends what they do when they’re reading a book they aren’t enjoying. It happens to all of us. We start reading, expecting to be captivated from the first page to the last, but for various reasons, we find it hard to keep going. Perhaps the writing is too dry, the story too dull, or we just don’t understand it. Some of my friends are book-finishers, determined that no book they start will
An essential component of creating comics is, of course, drawing. I’ve never considered myself much of a drawer. There’s a specific bird I doodle on occasion, a part flamingo, part emu creation I inherited from my mother’s doodles. I have my own little doodle creation, a heart-shaped dude with devil horns. I’m great (relatively speaking) at daisies, palm trees, and cute little elephants drawn from
Reading Tamryn Bennett’s “Comics Poetry: Beyond ‘Sequential Art,’” I feel compelled to try again. The article takes a jab at McCloud’s definition of comics as “sequential art” and champions Charles Hatfield’s idea that “no single formula for interpreting the page can reliably unlock every comic.” Bennett also promotes Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ “concept of segmentivity” and proposes "a theory
The young adult graphic novel The Prince and the Dressmaker, by Jen Wang, is an enjoyable, heart-warming story that attracts all age groups. Wang’s goal was to create her ideal Disney movie, and she has done just that, although it was Universal, not Disney, that recently acquired the movie rights to The Prince and the Dressmaker. The obvious popularity of this modern fairy tale begs an
Award-winning cartoonist Scott McCloud is known as a comics theorist, or as some call him, the Aristotle of comics. This title was bestowed on him after the release of his 1993 book Understanding Comics, which in part explores the definition, history, and vocabulary of comics. For his part, McCloud states “depending on who you ask, I'm either comics' leading theorist or a deranged
Confession: I have never read a superhero comic book. I’ve never watched any of the superhero movies either, with the exception of Batman. Batman, after all, has the coolest toys. While I’ve never cracked open a Batman comic, in my mind I imagine the classic ones to be much like the 1966-1968 Batman TV series starring Adam West as the caped crusader. No, I’m not that old, but as a kid I
I first encountered Aidan Koch’s comic “What Did You See?” in my first Comics and Graphic Narrative class. It was grouped with other short comics assigned as weekly readings. Some were what I was used to from a comic, having grown up reading Archie and the Sunday “Funny Pages” as I called them – panels in color or black and white with word balloons above the characters. "What did you
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