Week 11: Comics as temporary literature

At first comics were regarded as something that makes you lazy. I still remember my mother nagged me when I read comic books that she said they will disturb my school work degrading my GPA. Until comics get officially accepted as an art, there were many hardships and many artists challenged themselves but never gave up. Today, combined with details of art and sophisticated narratives, the terminology “graphic novels” were created. One of the greatest artists who exploited the field of graphic narratives is David Mazzuchelli, who created “Asterios Polyp”.

In summary of the story, Asterios Polyp, a protagonist who has a successful life as an architect, loses everything he has through a disaster in a day. Then he travels to a town named Apogee, which defines a climax, to find out who he is, was, and has been. He looks back his previous 50 years of life and figures out what was really important to him, especially his memories with Hana, Asterios’ ex-wife. Then he realizes how egotistic he was before, and tries to go back to Hana passing through a harsh blizzard on the journey.

This comic consists of multiple themes such as a true meaning of life, character versus self, and art of architect. These types element cannot be shown in other forms of art but only comics. The author has reached a new level of the comic filed, utilizing words, art styles, cuts, or speech bubbles. For example, the fonts in characters’ words represent their characteristics, and delicate nuances from their speech bubbles. Also, even without words, the audience could understand through the arts.

David mainly focused on narrative fonts. Every single character, including extras, contains their own fonts based on their characteristics, like everyone in the world has individual voices. Because of his ethereal details, I felt as if I could hear their voices while reading his graphic narrative. Even a single line and color scheme, he uses as a tool to describe situations that characters are facing with. Asterios, with a cold-minded and logical personality, goes with a bluish outline. On the other hand, Hana who has affable and sensible characteristics follows with a pink color. The best visual scene I get fascinated is a moment that these two characters fall in love together. The two contrast colors coordinate each other by overlapping their lines and become one.

Week 10: Japanese Manga

This week’s assignment is my favorite topic because I have a lot to talk about manga. As I mentioned in the previous essays before, becoming a Japanese manga artist was my life dream. Since I was a child, I read various types of manga such as Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto, or Death Note. The manga I just mentioned are published by the Shonen Jump company, where I wanted to go mostly.

Japanese Manga started around the mid 19th century as a magazine form, which was mainly inspired by the American comic strips. Since that time, many manga artists demonstrated their pieces that pioneer as today’s manga form, and one of the greatest artists is Osamu Tezuka, known as a godfather of manga. He had produced various master pieces of manga such as Phoenix, Black Jack, or Astro Boy. Tezuka founded today’s profit structure of the Japanese animation, which animations are created based on original manga series. From that characters from the animation and manga are made as goods, and companies get profits from the sales.

While the American graphic novel artists especially from the Marvel or DC comics create their own stories based on the already existed characters like spiderman or superman, Japanese manga artist create their original characters and stories. Also, since Japanese manga artists publish their works in magazines, they are ranked weekly from surveys. If they are survey as low ranks and it repeats, they are forced to finish their works no matter how much they plan their stories, so settings and storylines are easily fluctuated. A Shonen Jump manga “Bakuman” contains this information in detail. It demonstrates the tough life of manga artists and I personally this can be used as a textbook for anyone preparing to be manga artists.

Week 9: European Comics

European Comics have their own characteristics campared to American Comics and Japanese Manga. Especially France and Belgium produce many comics and have their own name “Bande dessinée” or “Bédé”, like America has the name Comic Strips and Japan has Manga. For the style, Bédé is mainly created by one artist unlike Manga artists work with their assistants, but sometimes the Bédé artists divide their roles with art and story.

Unlike the Comic Strips and Manga, the European comics more focus on arts and because of that, an auteurism can be easily found in the European comics. An auteur defines an artist who takes control over all features of synergic creative works. An auteurism insists that the originality and characteristics of artists must be clearly shown in their works. Now it is regarded as a commonsense but even during the mid twentieth century it was not.

One of the great European comic artists is Jean Giraud, whose pen name is Moebius. Since his comics got published, many artists in Europe, America, and even Asia were influenced around 1970s and 1980s, and Jean Giraud became known as the best Sci-Fi artists. The main reason I think that he got acknowledged is because he embraced various styles and worlds from other artists and reapplied them to his work.