Journals for EN224P: The Graphic Novel

Journal One: Racial Profiling

Like the propaganda of any war, the enemy characters portrayed in the “Blackhawk” Military Comics series are shown in such a light as to make them seem inhuman to the reader. For example, the Scavengers are literally drawn to look like rats—rodent scavengers. The Blackhawks’ Asian accomplice/sidekick is colored yellow, is named “Chop-Chop,” and speaks in broken English, changing R’s to L’s in his speech. Blackhawk and his compatriots also use the term “rats” for the Nazis, further dehumanizing them, making it easier for readers to see them as enemies and want to kill them. The Nazis also dehumanize the Allies, calling them “dogs,” “pigs,” and other such animal names.

Not only that, but Blackhawk’s allies are also portrayed with racially distinct characteristics. Olaf, for example, is of Scandinavian descent, and his dialogue is littered with V’s replacing W’s, and even a reference to the ancient Norse god, Thor, who is among a pantheon no longer worshipped by modern Norwegians.

While this dehumanization and exaggeration of characteristics may have helped in World War II, when the enemy was definitely of one or two ethnic groups, it influenced readers and non-readers alike past the war. I believe that this type of propaganda has spread to cause so much trouble with racial profiling in the modern day.

Since I began working for TSA (the Transportation Security Administration) two and a half years ago, I have learned that “the enemy” does not just have one kind of face. There are people from many different countries and ethnicities who would seek to destroy others, and focusing on one race’s profile does not help us to defend ourselves against them—instead, it blinds us to the real threats that are out there.

Since the Axis in World War II were mostly Germans and Japanese, racial profiling would have made sense back then. However, people in the modern world have taken that too far, and can no longer see the real enemy for the one they perceive through racism.

Journal Two: Characters in Costume

Superheroes are everywhere.  Television, movies, novels and of course, comics.  Because superheroes are everywhere, it’s difficult to see value in any group of superheroes or any group of stories about one specific superhero.  It’s like a holiday or birthday gift—the thoughtfulness of the giver or the message that the giver is trying to impart often gets lost in superficial aspects of the gift itself.  (“Is it a good color?”  “Did the recipient ask for it?” or “Is it the right style?” as opposed to “I thought you might like this,” “You need a shower” or “I love you.”)

Most people who do not know much about superhero comics believe that they are for children, and have no value at all as literature that can teach anything worthwhile.  However, even though there are a lot of superhero comics that have little to no real substance, even the lightest superhero comic can teach right from wrong, the value of compassion for others, and many other moral lessons to children.  Superhero comics can also teach children what not to do through the actions of super villains.

Superhero comics can also explore, through stories adapted to a fictional world with a fictional history, issues which adults struggle with in the real world.  For instance, in Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, the constant back-and-forth of the newscasters, the mayor, Commissioner Gordon, Bruce Wayne, and the new police commissioner explores the positive and negative effects of vigilante justice, and whether or not vigilantes vicariously commit the crimes they are actually trying to stop.  Miller’s work also explores the idea of “victims’ rights,” as well as whether or not rehabilitation for emotionally and mentally disturbed repeat-offenders actually works.

Not having read that many comics myself, I have no trouble taking the more serious comics seriously—I can usually tell when there is a deeper issue involved than mere entertainment—and the lighter ones as fun, but insubstantial, “just another superhero” comics.

Journal Three: Villains

In Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, the various villains drive the story in two ways.

First, the Mutants, who commit crimes and wreak havoc at the beginning of the story, are the impetus for Bruce Wayne’s return to crime-fighting.  In a previous comic, he had retired from being the Batman, because of the death of the previous Robin, whose real name was Jason.

I personally knew nothing about that particular plot point, not having read any Batman comics before this, but Bruce’s struggle to stay away from his previous life as the Batman despite the new crimes shows that Jason’s death hit him very hard.  Finally, the Mutants go too far, and, as the title says, the Dark Knight returns.

Also, Harvey Dent, also known as Two-Face, is released from Arkham Asylum.  In the beginning, Bruce is actually supportive of Dent’s rehabilitation—unlike Commissioner Gordon.  But Dent, even with his new face, is still plagued by multiple personality disorder, and kills more people.  He contributes to the Batman’s return, but his actions do something to Batman—Batman does more damage to the criminals now than ever before.  He seeks to destroy the villains, instead of just sending them to jail.  Harvey Dent’s failure to rehabilitate shows Bruce Wayne/Batman that serial criminals will never stop, and legal justice will never stop them either.

Finally, the Joker is released from Arkham Asylum, and immediately murders hundreds of Gotham’s citizens.  Batman is forced to kill the Joker while avoiding the new police commissioner and trying to stay alive himself.

Once the Joker is dead, Superman hunts Batman down, as though he is the villain, because he’s taken the law into his own hands and killed a criminal.  But in the wake of an electromagnetic pulse and nuclear winter, Batman becomes the hero once again—he organizes the former Mutants, those who call themselves the Sons of Batman, into an unofficial police force, and stops the riots caused by the mob mentality of Gotham’s scared residents.

In the end, The Dark Knight Returns shows that, while true villains can never be turned—will never be good once they’ve gone bad—those villains who were only looking for leadership can and will follow the most charismatic of heroes, at least into a state of non-criminality, if not outright goodness.

Journal Four: Ideal Women

William Marston’s creation, Wonder Woman depicts a heroine who is honest, courageous, strong and intelligent.  Wonder Woman is also loyal, staying by the man she loves from day to day, even if it is in disguise.

Diana is not a push-over, however, not by a long shot.  When the Major tells her to stay somewhere and wait for him and the Colonel to come back, she sneaks out and does her own thing.  Diana, even when she’s not in costume as Wonder Woman, will not take any flak from anyone.

I was surprised that Hypolita made Wonder Woman’s costume for her at first, because many women today would not let their daughters in public wearing anything so revealing.  But then I thought it made sense, because Hypolita and Diana come from a society based on that of the Amazons of ancient Greece, and floor-length skirts and shirts that cover everything would only get in the way in a fight.

The Holliday College girls, including Etta Candy, were also strong women.  They may have been members in a college sorority, but they did not let anyone push them around, and did not wait around to be rescued.  They were usually able to get out of traps themselves, if not with the help of Wonder Woman.

Etta herself is another case in point.  She is chubby, but she is confident in her own identity, and in the fact that she likes candy.  She refuses to change to suit other peoples’ image of the perfect body type, and she’s not afraid to tell them off for trying to change her.  The fact that she is the leader of the sorority is also telling.  In modern colleges, the “fat girls” are most likely not even going to be accepted into sororities, much less be in charge of them.

I’m not sure if Wonder Woman’s particular brand of “take charge attitude” would be accepted today or not.  In fact, the way she goes about showing her strengths, but still mooning over the Major, might put some modern women off—the idea of a strong woman wanting a man might seem anti-feminist to many who call themselves “feminist.”

Personally, I think that real feminism is the opportunity and will to choose what we want, as well as the courage and development of ability to go out and get it.
Journal Five: Too Much is Too Much

Since God Nose could not be accessed through my Blackboard account, and since I don't really know how to word what I want to say in response to the prompt for this particular journal assignment, I have chosen to make Journal #5 one of the two that I skip this semester.

Journal Six: Now and Today

Modern graphic novels usually focus on one long storyline or a single character.  Such is the case with Eisner’s A Contract With God.  The story begins with the death of Frimme Hirsch’s daughter, Rachele, and follows him through his bitterness and grief.  Hirsch believes that God has violated a contract that Hirsch made when he was a boy, and therefore feels no need to keep up his end of the contract anymore.  Eventually, Frimme comes to realize that his life is empty without the contract, and seeks to enter into another one.  He asks the elders of the synagogue to draw one up for him, and he accepts what they write.  Just as he begins to plan for the future with this new contract, however, Frimme dies.  Another boy finds the stone on which Frimme had written his old contract, and takes it up as his own, beginning the cycle again.

Like Frimme’s story, Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns has roots in a death—that of Jason, who once was Batman’s sidekick, Robin.  Bruce Wayne decides to give up being Batman, because he just can’t take the responsibility of young men’s deaths anymore, but fifteen years later, when old nemeses—and new gangs—plague Gotham City, Bruce takes up the mantle again.  This time, a girl wears the costume of the “boy wonder.”  At the end of the story, Batman is “dead,” and Bruce Wayne teaches the former gang members all he knows about keeping Gotham crime free, a cycle complete.
Journal Seven: Heroism Reconsidered

I am honestly not sure who the hero of V for Vendetta really is.  Sometimes, it seems like it’s V, because he kills the bad people, but on the other hand he kills the bad people.  Maybe he’s an anti-hero?  Or maybe the villains are just so much more evil than he is that he just looks like a hero in comparison?  I mean, he kills them, and he’s insane, but they are so much worse than he is: child molesters, racists, people who do dangerous and untested experiments on other human beings.  It kind of makes you long for a simple, run-of-the-mill, insane murderer guy like V.

A hero is someone who stands up for what’s right, and does it in such a way as to not make anything worse.  But the world of V for Vendetta is pretty much as bad as it gets already.  And at some point, the bad guys cross the point of no return—that point where they’re beyond redeemable.  I guess V believes that the best way to stop the badness, with the least negative fallout is by getting rid of the bad guys for good, because they’re just that powerful—they could come back and start all over again if they aren’t dead.

Journal Eight: Anonymous V

At first, I thought “Anonymous” was another comic book character, because it was capitalized, and there was no more information associated with the name.  After a couple of minutes’ Googling, I figured out that what was probably meant was “the various protest groups called ‘Anonymous.’”  Given the fact that I did not even know that there were any such protest groups, who seem to protest politics like V (only a lot less violently) while wearing Guy Fawkes masks, I honestly have no idea what the connection may mean for contemporary society.

However, since V believed that society had to be torn down to rubble before anything good could come of it, I think that the fact that Anonymous uses Guy Fawkes masks like V could mean that Anonymous believes that they need to tear down the current regime (whatever that is, in whichever country they’re in) so that something better can be built in its place.

It would also help if I knew more than just two facts about Guy Fawkes:

·         He was some sort of British traitor who tried to blow up Parliament.
·         The British burn him in effigy every year.

Maybe, if I knew more than those two facts—since, being American myself, I never really learned British history as thoroughly as I learned the (admittedly, small) portion of American history that I know—I could appreciate the connection between Guy Fawkes, V and Anonymous better.

As it is, V for Vendetta is an awesome comic, and gets really deep into a lot of the themes I saw in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which I loved, but I don’t really know the politics, the background, of it.

 

Journal Nine: Crossing Borders

I think Joe Sacco is extremely successful in merging comics with journalism.  The medium definitely does justice to the content, and the “cartoonish” drawings, instead of “undermin[ing] the credibility and accuracy,” make it easier for readers to empathize with the people Sacco meets.  Scott McCloud said in Understanding Comics that the less detailed a drawing is, the more we can relate to it.

Sacco’s drawings are somewhere between unrecognizable cartoons and fully-realized drawings of actual people.  This helps not only to present the stories he tells in a way that readers will be able to see instead of just read, but it also helps the reader to separate themselves just enough from such emotionally-charged experiences that they can process the information being given instead of only cringing away in horror at the atrocities done to the Palestinian people.  With that little bit of distance, readers can take what they have learned about the conflict and maybe start to do something about stopping the horror.

Journal Ten: Encountering the Other

In Palestine, Joe Sacco presents mostly the Palestinian side of the Israeli occupation, but does not neglect the Israeli side.  He asks the reader to reconsider the typical bias against the Palestinian people by showing not only that they throw rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers, but also why they do so, and what has provoked them into violence.  He also explains the history of the occupation and how the Paliestinians were—and in many ways, still are—considered a non-people.  Sacco spends time among the refugees, takes down their stories, and uses a medium most journalists would not to get those stories to as many people as possible.

I think he is rather successful at getting comic book readers to think differently about the conflict, but not many other people would think to look at Palestine, or probably even know it exists for the reading.

Journal Eleven: (Missing)

Journal Twelve: Graphic Self

Having read only full autobiographies before and never an actual memoir, I don’t really know how Fun Home alters the memoir genre.  However, I believe that the fact that “the writer is also the artist” is important because the drawings are colored by the author/artist’s perception of her own past.  In the case of Fun Home, though Bechdel’s drawings are simple but recognizable individual people and places, the way she draws them also shows her feelings toward them.  Her father, an emotionally detached character more likely to show affection for a garden than his children, is often drawn as stone-faced.  Bechdel’s drawings of herself as a child are usually boyish—I had trouble differentiating her from her drawings of her brothers, until I realized that she’d drawn them as blonds.

Journal Thirteen: Personal History

Although it may seem, on the surface, that there is no narrative to speak of in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, there really is.  It is the narrative of a man who has come as close as a person can get to a disaster without dying in it.

Actually, it is a double-narrative—two stories in one.  In the first, and least-talked-about narrative, he goes through his actions that day: hearing the first plane hitting with his wife, worrying about their daughter, going to the school and picking her up, and so on.  The second narrative details what goes on in Spiegelman’s head, not only on that day, but for years afterward: the sky is falling, and how he copes with that realization.

Journal Fourteen: Visual Architecture

Chris Ware’s Quimby the Mouse is a very minimalist, black-and-white comic.  The backgrounds are stark, simple, and show only what is necessary to advance the plot.  The foreground is filled with bold lines, and there is not much differentiation—not a lot of grey, if any.

On the other hand, Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland is a veritable smorgasbord of color and detail.  The realistic drawing of not only fore and background, but of the characters as well, really makes the reader believe that they are in Slumberland—that they are experiencing Nemo’s dreams.

Journal Fifteen: Make Believe

There are no real significant supernatural elements in Gilbert Hernandez’s Heartbreak Soup.  So, comparing it to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is a case of “apples versus oranges.”  Hernandez’s work is mostly real-life-based, while Rowling’s is meant from page one to be supernatural.  The only supernatural elements in Heartbreak Soup are the presence of ghosts and the apparently-magical “heartbreak soup,” while in Harry Potter there are not only ghosts, but magic, spells and fantastical creatures as well.

Journal Sixteen: Short Form

One of the advantages of mini-comics is that they are short.  They can be read in less time than even a regular-sized magazine comic issue.  Unlike normal-length comics, this means that mini-comics can be read in places and times that would normally prohibit the ability to finish the story, such as on a break at work or on the toilet.

Mini-comics also have their disadvantages, however.  For instance, the story in a mini-comic has to be so compressed that the artist has to either cram as much of the plot into each page as possible, or severely abridge a full story.  In the former case, the page would be so cluttered that readers have trouble reading it, while in the latter, readers may not understand what is going on by the time the story is over, because too much has been left out.

Finding a balance between too much and too little is necessary for a successful mini-comic.

Journal Seventeen: Post-Apocalyptic Settings

The common themes in post-apocalyptic fiction include survival—against a world that no longer can supply it’s people’s needs as well as a new enemy which seeks to either kill the people or steal what little resources available—and hope for a better future, possibly like the one before the apocalypse, but not always.

Since I read Nausicaa instead of The Walking Dead, I’d have to say that Miyazaki’s Ohmu is the enemy against which humanity is to survive, but it turns out that the Ohmu are actually the good guys, while the humans are just fighting against each other for resources they believe are dwindling away.

The hope of this comic is in the Sea of Corruption, which is not so much a sea as a forest.  Most of humanity believes this forest is toxic, but it is really cleansing the land so that it will once again be able to support edible flora and fauna.

Journal Eighteen: Revisiting Fantasy

To me, a “fairy tale” is a specific type of “fantasy” story, so I don’t know how the two could be blended.  The talking animals in Medley’s Castle Waiting would seem to be appealing to younger audiences; however, the themes of arranged marriage, spousal abuse and adultery that are alluded to throughout the first half of the volume in subtle ways are for a more adult mindset.

I believe that, in making the characters look like those for a children’s story, Medley makes it easier to talk about these darker, more adult themes, and show by example how wrong (or not) they are.  At the same time, if children were to happen upon Castle Waiting, they would not be disturbed by any blatantly adult themes, but might learn better behavior by the examples set in the story.

Journal Nineteen: Red Revolution

I do not know enough about the differences between the various political “isms” to compare Willingham’s “Animal Farm” from Fables to socialism.