understading comics

         As a kid the way i learned to read was from comics. my first comic was Batman issue 500 and i pretty much didn't fully understand the story from the pictures alone so i had to read the ballons to get the idea of what was going on. so comics have always had a special place in my heart, so when i read Understanding Comics i enjoyed it very much. Scott McCloud's way of explaining how comics are done and arranged only strengthens my idea to use comics as a visually intresting way to get young kids to read more. how Scott explains how simplicity in the drawing and the story can actually be better than a highly detailed and complex arrangement of pictures that can cause confusion.

           The way he breaks everything down to illustrate how comics work is very refreshing and the fact that its done in a comic form is added sugar on top. it makes the book more enjoyable as a reader who loves comics and honestly finds reading novels and other books a bit boring, and the fact that he explains that comics is another type of art form made me so happy and gave me justification to explain to my parents that i want to do comics. the read was very enjoyable and i would recommend it to anyone interested in comics.

Tin Tin

        Tin Tin is a character i know of but am not to familiar with like my familiarity Batman of Superman. I remember seeing the animated Tin Tin adventures as a kid on cartoon network or something like that. so i knew Tin Tin was an adventurer like indiana jones or more closely to johnny quest. i didn't know till much later that Tin Tin was a french comic character. now having read some of the comics and seeing some of the shows i wish i was more exposed to Tin Tin because i feel that he was kind of like the idea boy childhood, going on adventures and being in the middle of action, and going to exotic places. I had never seen the Tin Tin movie because i heard mixed reviews about it and was unsure about it, but i did like to see that character that seems t be from a earlier time period get brought back for a more contemporary time, but also not be made modern. as i said eariler Tin Tin reminds me of one of my favorite cartoon characters Johnny Quest, they are both young adventurers that end up saving the day with the help and resourcefulness of their friends. it maybe possible drew a lot from Tin Tin and that is not a bad thing. i know Tin Tin had a very long publication run and was popular in france so maybe to create similar feedback in the U.S. Johnny Quest was created. so Tin Tin could have had a good impact on culture sparking the young male adventurers like quest, hardy boys, etc. Tin Tin is the type of character i could easily get into and stay with wishing i had his adventures.

underground comics

     I can honestly say that before reading Doping Dan in class, i had never read any underground comics before. my own expereince with comics were always mainstream superhero comics so seeing a comic with so much drug use and seeing some others with subtle and not so suble sexual content was very refreshing. i had no idea that underground comics were such a big genre and had such a following. it even had its own animation. animation i swear was for those tripping balls because that stuff gave me headachs and honestly started to irritate the hell out of me. however the comics themselves were awesome to read. they were raw, gritty, and real. they didn't censor themselves and why should they? they were not part of the comics code so they could get away with anything and i love that concept. i do with thaat some of the art wasn't so cartoony but thats my own personal taste. i didn't get a chance to read a lot of the comics passed out in class but the few i skimmed through Doping Dan and a Zap comic. it was clear that this was not the comics i grew up with and thats not a bad thing. mainstream comics can get very confusing very fast due to overly complex stories and other BS, but these underground comics can be about real experiences that people had or completly random things (not particularly my favorite). this genre of comics i feel are more in the light by todays standards by way or the internet and the vast amounts of online comics that some may follow the same tradition of underground comics andso more people especially to day are expoesed to them. 

Maus

     Maus was a interesting comic and i can see why it one so many awards. i did not realizes how long it was. it took me four an a half hours to finish it. The story is about Art Speigelman's fathers time surviving the holocaust and how he and his family evaded the nazis in world war two. i found his story very engaging and thought provoking. It showed how clever and resourceful his father was trying to evade capture of him and his family. what started to annoy me about the comic was how it would constantly and abruptly cut back to the present when Art is interviewing his father. i would get so invested into the story and then sudden cut to the present, not my favorite parts.

     while reading through the first book i realized it was more about Arts relationship with his father and how they get along, and also his fathers story. however Art's story tends to compete with his fathers and personally i don't much care for Art's story, i care about his fathers. Art also seems to have some resentment towards his father for being i guess "the stereotypical jew". I feel if anyone were to survive what his father been through by surviving hell on earth. then his father can act be however he wants. His fathers stories of how he lived with his in-laws and helped them move from safe haven to safe haven shows just how horrible his situation was and what he and other people did to survive, and that to me is more than Art complaining that his dad wants him to come over for the weekend to fix the roof.

     I assume tha these two stories are supposed to parallel each other in some way by showing how much better Art had it than his father at his age but it comes off showing that Art is trying to compare his troubles with his father, and it can't be done. it seems like this more so in the second book when Art is talking about how well the first book did and he is making money of his fathers story. i can see why Maus has won so many awards and is such a good read but i could do with Art's side of the story.