Webcomics: Miss Abbott and the Doctor

Link to Miss Abbott and the Doctor on Line Webtoon

The interesting thing about Miss Abbott and the Doctor is that it's a webcomic that is designed specifically for an app. The Line website even says "Continue reading this in your bed by downloading the Line Webtoon app!" Miss Abbott and the Doctor is meant to be read by scrolling down through the story, and it is easiest to do this on a smart phone. Scrolling down on a computer always feels clunkier, while scrolling on the phone feels natural and helps you become engrossed in the story. To me this is one of the most convenient ways to read a webcomic.

Unfortunately, Miss Abbott and the Doctor is the only comic that I've become invested in from the Line Webtoon app so far. The app has tons of comics, but MA&tD is the one I'm loyal to. Since it's on the app, not many people have heard of it yet.

Now onto the content of the comic. MA&tD is a romance comic set in not-entirely-accurate 18th century England. What attracted me to it was how bare bones it is. The art is bare bones, though charming and beautiful, made up of only pencil sketches and suggestions of a background. The story is also very bare bones, at least at first. To me, the story feels like if there was a romantic subplot in a movie, and the movie was trimmed to only include the most romantic scenes. The beginning of the comic is mostly just romantic tension between the main characters with not much plot. Plot and backstory is explored later in the comic, but the romance is the most important part. And it is a very sweet romance.

Other webcomics I'd recommend:

Best Friends Forever- 200 pg free pdf on Gumroad
Cucumber Quest
Neokosmos (I haven't read much of this but it has a unique format for a webcomic)

Pretty Deadly

1. I read the first two issues of Pretty Deadly. I found the story a bit hard to follow, but the art was so beautiful I had to keep reading. I think it's a story I'll have to read a couple times to understand. There were a lot of plot threads going on, like the vulture girl and the blind man, the daughter of death, and the woman with white hair going after her.

I found the color design and the line work especially effective in telling the story. The brushstrokes describe the action that the characters are doing and makes you feel the intensity of the environment and the moments they are in. The artist also knew the psychology of color and each "scene" in the comic is given a color scheme that evokes a mood. The sex scene had bright pink and warm reds, the fight scenes used an intense red and orange color scheme, and scenes that depicted isolation in the snow used stark whites. Even if I didn't understand all the details of what was going on, I could understand the emotion.

2. The elements of the story that I was able to connect with were the themes of discovering who you are, who you're meant to be, and the nature of death. The other day, my counselor and I were doing a guided meditation exercise where I imagined death as a person and described it. I really loved the character design of death in this comic. It was different than what I imagined the day before, but there was still familiar elements to it, such as the black outfit. I also loved the animal skull. The characterization also felt similar because death in this comic doesn't show emotion on his face, but he still has deep feelings of love and loyalty. Every character is tied to him and his story, and they can't escape his influence on their lives.

3. If I was adapting this story to a different medium, I would adapt it to a TV mini series and have each of the first episodes introduce a different character. Then it would all culminate into the moments where all the characters meet each other. It is a shorter story than what is usually adapted from comics into television, such as the Walking Dead, but even the Walking Dead took the outline of its source material and branched out into different characters and stories. The mythology of Pretty Deadly feels so rich that I think it could be expanded upon. For example, I found the parts where they were in the land of the dead so beautiful, but it's not a huge part of the comic. I'm debating if it would be a live action show or an animated show. Maybe it could be a rotoscoped show with the same style of brush linework. I like the idea of it being rotoscoped because the subject matter is so mythological yet feels so connected to reality.

Diary of a Dominatrix

This week I read Diary of a Dominatrix by Molly Kiely. This one I found really interesting because it doesn't glamorize sex work like you think it would (well, for the most part). It really shows that it's a job, first and foremost.  For Zelda, it's something mundane and part of her normal life, even if it doesn't feel normal to the person reading it. Sometimes the most surprising parts of the book were the mundane parts, like the fact that she has a boyfriend who knows what her job is. I remember watching this show called Secret Diary of a Call Girl, where the fact that the protagonist was a sex worker was this big mysterious secret that got in the way of her love life, etc. It felt more like a fantasy than something realistic, and I was worried that Diary of a Dominatrix was going to be the same thing.

However, what I find interesting about Diary of a Dominatrix is that it's not telling the reader to feel a certain way. It's not shaming the reader for being curious, or asking the reader to be totally okay with sex work, or asking the reader to be against it. It's just presenting the facts. Some people reading it might find the detailed artwork grotesque, and some might find it attractive. Every person is going to have a unique experience with it. To me, I just found it interesting to be able to spend a day in the life of someone with a completely different lifestyle than me. I love how comics can transport you into another person's shoes.

Asterios Polyp

One thing that stood out to me while reading Asterios Polyp was the design of the book. Every detail, from the character design to the font used to the shape of the word bubbles, is used with purpose to show the reader the personality of the characters. Characters with big personalities will speak in large word bubbles with upper case font, and characters with shy personalities will speak with tiny fonts, etc. I noticed that the choices of font and design also gave me an idea of what the characters would sound like. For example, I'd read Hana's words in a very soft voice, which I attributed to the font and the character design. No two characters "sounded" the same to me, which I liked a lot. Sometimes if you read a comic where every character is speaking in the same upper case font all the time, it can feel repetitive.

Every aspect of the book is designed with purpose. The style the characters are drawn in shows how they are feeling. For example, when Asterios and Hana are fighting, their character designs will become more and more abstract and distinct from each other to show their emotional distance. Page 216 has a great sequence where the style of the characters starts to leak into the space that they share. When Hana becomes dominant in the argument, her sketchy style dominates the environment. By the end, Hana shrinks back into herself and Asterios' geometric style dominates the space. I hope that I can incorporate this attention to detail in my own narrative works.

Manga: My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

This week, I read My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Nagata Kabi. It is an autobiographical manga about a woman's struggles with mental illness and her experience with a lesbian escort agency. When I was reading this manga, it felt very different from any other manga I've read. I couldn't think of Japanese comics that were like it. Though the art and writing style are quite different, it reminded me of Western works such as Blankets and Maus since it is a story taken from real life. I wonder if this is because there's more of a cultural difference with the way Japanese society talks about mental illness and sexuality compared to Western society. Nagata Kabi also addresses the anxiety and the struggle to find a stable job in Japan and to impress one's parents.

Another aspect about this manga that stood out to me was that even though there's nudity and sex in the comic, it's not a very "sexy" comic. I was worried that it was going to be a mostly erotic manga and I was surprised that most of the comic is about Nagata Kabi's mental health and her internal struggles. Even when there is a sex scene, the way it's drawn and paced out isn't meant to look titillating, it's meant to show how she was actually feeling. She draws herself with goofy weird faces and puts in every awkward moment. It felt realistic and I could understand the awkwardness and embarrassment she was feeling. One thing that I thought was funny was that her expectation going in was that the experience would be like an "erotic doujinshi," and the types of doujinshi she reads are yaoi doujinshi. I'm wondering why it is that so many lesbians (at least ones I know) are yaoi fans, or discovered their sexuality through yaoi. Maybe it's because yaoi is catered toward women in the first place. Yuri is catered to men and is therefore less appealing to gay women than yaoi, ironically. But that is going on a tangent that I don't really have answers for.

Overall, I would definitely recommend this manga, and I would love to know if there are more autobiographical Japanese comics like it. The art style is very cute and I loved the simple use of pink in it.

European Comic Artists: Kerascoet

This week, I read comics by Kerascoet, a French duo of comic writers. The works I read were Beauty, Beautiful Darkness, and Miss Pas Touche.

Beauty is still my favorite of the three. I first read it in high school. It's one of those graphic novels that you can't put down until you've finished it. I think it's so engrossing because it's such a simple premise, yet the authors know how to escalate the situation. If a woman really did become the most beautiful woman in the world, to a supernatural level, what would happen?

An element that stands out when you read it is that the way Coddie is drawn per panel changes, since the spell she is under doesn't affect her true appearance but the way she is perceived. To me, this helps with the immersion into the story, because you are either seeing Coddie through her own eyes or through the eyes of others.

The other comic that I read for the first time this week was Beautiful Darkness. This comic was actually the first time I'd heard of Kerascoet, in high school, but I didn't read it then. My friend had brought the comic into art one class and was reading it. Even from the cover of the book alone, there was something very disturbing about it to me. In high school I would get very scared of the kind of media that would mix cute and childlike art with grisly horror art. This time, though, I gathered up the courage to read it. Its message about human nature and evil didn't scare me like I thought it would. Maybe because in the years since I was in high school, especially since 2016, I've realized how evil the world can be. What's interesting to me about the characters in the book are that the ones who are trying to hold on to their normal lifestyles instead of adapting are the ones that commit the most evil. Zelie is trying to stay the popular, glamorous princess, with beautiful gowns and servants. In the process, her husband and everyone around her perishes, but she doesn't see the problem with it. She doesn't realize she's being evil, she just thinks she's maintaining her lifestyle. It's a very fascinating book. The watercolor gore does gross me out, though.

Miss Pas Touche was the last one I read, and it's probably my least favorite of the three. It still has beautiful art and themes about human cruelty, but it's not as engrossing and fantastical as the other two. Overall, I'd definitely recommend Kerascoet to anyone interested in European comics.

Stereotypes in Comics

When we were discussing stereotypes in class, it reminded me of a recent Jay Z music video called "The Story of OJ."

The video uses a Fleischer-style animation and stereotypes from cartoons of that era.

It also reminded me of the Betty Boop cartoon we watched where the animation would transition from the black drummers in Cab Calloway's band to racist depictions of African people. I remember that moment in the cartoon really disgusting me because I realized that the animators knew what they were doing. Fleischer is praised sometimes for showcasing the music of black artists from the day, but they still found it normal to compare real people to those stereotypes, even if it was people they were working with.

Will Eisner said that stereotypes should be used to communicate ideas quickly within comics. I understand what he was trying to say, but the stereotypes in, for example, the Fleischer cartoons aren't being used to quickly communicate an idea. They were cheap ways to get a laugh by preying on easy targets. This could be why some people still don't want to let go of these tired stereotypes, or don't want to get called out for using them. It's easier and faster to put a stereotype into a comic as a joke than it is to write a joke that is actually clever. Recently, there was controversy over a Miraculous Ladybug comic that had a character who was literally named "Ghetto Blaster" and was a racist stereotype. The only reason I could think that such a character could be put into a children's comic today is pure laziness. There's a big difference in stereotypes being used to make a thoughtful and brutal statement like in the Story of OJ, and stereotypes used out of laziness like in Miraculous Ladybug.

Maus

What made the graphic novel Maus so memorable to me was its honesty. What stood out to me immediately was how natural the dialogue was. It even captured Vladek's unique way of speaking and felt authentic, like I could really hear him speaking to me. I wondered how the Art was able to do this. Then I got to the part where Art was shown using a tape recorder. I feel like it should've been obvious to me, but for some reason I thought Art's memories and note taking were so well done that he could remember exactly what his father said. I wonder if other graphic novelists have used this technique of recording conversations and using it as dialogue in their books. It would certainly be easier to do today with the ability to record someone immediately with your phone.

There are parts of the book that were most likely embellished by Art and not recorded, such as the fourth wall breaking part where he and his wife are speaking about whether she should be portrayed as a frog or a mouse, and the parts where he is hounded by reporters about what he is going to do now that the first Maus was such a success. This still contributes to the sincerity of the book, though, because Art was being honest about the emotions he was going through. It was surreal to be able to hear an author's thoughts on the book they are writing as you are reading it. I especially admired that Art was willing to depict not only his father's bravery, but his flaws as well. He voiced his own fears about depicting his father as a miserly Jewish stereotype, or as someone with prejudices against other races, but still put these details in the book anyway. It made the book feel all the more relatable. Even though I'm not Jewish, I could relate to struggling to connect with an older relative, and struggling to wrap your head around their past trauma.

Underground Comics- Zippy Stories

What I noticed first about the Zippy comics was that I really like the page layout and size. There are usually four panels to a page along with captions and large text. A lot of underground comics I've read can get very overwhelming with complicated art styles and too much tiny handwritten texts. Of course, sometimes those comics are meant to be complicated and crude. Zippy felt different to me because the art style looks very traditional for a comic. I was able to read each panel and page easily, so the pacing flowed much better. However, the subject matter and writing are very unconventional. It feels like a comic that was written in a stream of consciousness way rather than being planned out. The characters move from strange location to strange location very quickly without much explanation.

The section of the comic that stood out the most to me was the one where Zippy visits Disney World. The comic wasn't afraid to explicitly call it Disney and use Mickey characters instead of making a parody of Disney World that you might see in another comic. Underground comics tend to have more guts to critique on "untouchable" parts of society and culture. This is probably because the writers didn't have to worry about pleasing a publisher of a big company. The characterization of Zippy also allows the writer to critique society, because he is an outsider. He can look at something everyone else considers normal, like Disney, and question it. We can learn from characters like this to question our own beliefs about what is and isn't normal.

Blankets by Craig Thompson

Blankets really struck a chord with me and I was crying a lot while reading it. I love when a comic can do that. I think what appealed to me the most about it is that it is a work about the beauty of life but it is unafraid to be honest about the disgusting, humiliating, and harmful parts of life as well. I have noticed that I like a lot of stories with that theme. Movies like Eternal Sunshine, American Beauty, and Swiss Army Man are really fascinating to me because of this.

When I thought about comic books that have that kind of tone, I thought about Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Marbles by Ellen Forney. These books also deal with sexuality and are autobiographical, like Blankets. It's amazing to me that graphic novelists can be so fearlessly honest about their own lives. Even more so than novelists, because they can draw themselves in the situations they experienced, even if it's a humiliating or traumatic experience like masturbating for the first time or being sexually assaulted by a babysitter. I love that Craig Thompson can not only capture the action of what is happening in his life, but can use gesture and linework to capture the emotion as well. What makes autobiographical graphic novels so impactful to me is that since they are able to get so explicit down to the finest detail, you can breathe a sigh of relief that you're not the only one to experience that kind of shame or humiliation. 

I am curious about what it is like for a comic artist to publish something so intimately personal for people to read for decades to come. I wondered if Craig Thompson's parents and brother have read the comic, for example. I'd like to read interviews with Craig Thompson to learn more. 

Charles Addams and The Addams Family

I wanted to write about Charles Addams' cartoon illustrations for the New Yorker from the 30s-70s, including his characters that would become The Addams Family. I don't know if they would qualify as comic "strips", but they are made of pictures and captions so I count them as comics in general. They are similar to Bil Keane's The Family Circus and other one panel comics which appear in newspapers.

Lately I've been really interested in The Addams Family as a transmedia property like the Archie comics. At first I'd only seen the Addams Family movies, but then I started going back and watching the TV show, and then finding the cartoons. I really love its style of humor and the way it "inverts" the values a typical American family would have.

One thing I find really interesting about the cartoons is that they're allowed to be a lot more morbid than the 60s TV show, or even the 90s movies at times. For example, there's one comic where Pugsley (the little boy) is dipping his arrows in poison with an evil grin on his face. There's nothing violent or bloody going on at that moment, but your mind connects the dots that the Pugsley is about to do something heinous. A lot of Charles Addams' pictures are like this, where nothing explicit is happening but the moment it clicks in your brain, you get a sick feeling in your stomach. Then you laugh.

I think that's part of what makes comic strip gags work, particularly one-panel gag strips. We're able to see a window into the world of the comic, but we can't turn our head and look in another view. We don't know anything about the characters or world besides what is presented to us. Everyone has an expectation about what a typical family or American life should be like. Charles Addams' cartoons are able to subvert those expectations and make us laugh at something disturbing or strange.

Understanding Comics

I first read Understanding Comics in high school, and the part of it that always stuck with me was on page 36 where Scott McCloud discusses how simplified cartoon images can make a reader see a reflection of themselves.

At the time in high school, my best friend and I were having an argument because she swore that she disliked all animated movies. As a future computer animation student this really annoyed me. Her argument was that because cartoons don't have real people, they're impossible to relate to. I disagreed with her. In fact, sometimes I found myself relating more to animated characters than characters played by actors in a gritty realistic setting, but I could never put my finger on why.

I think Scott McCloud's idea is really compelling. When we think about memories, we never get a clear visual right in front of us, but a fuzzy picture in our brains. If someday technology lets us transfer memories straight to a film, I think they would look very simplified and blurry.

When I'm reading a comic, the first thing I "read" tends to be the face. If it's a simple face, I can read the emotion faster. That means that I will empathize with the character faster. Comics with very simple styles tend to be things you can read quickly but still get a lot out of. Comics with very realistic and complex art styles, such as The Arrival, might take more than one read to get the most out of them. The Arrival was more about the journey and used atmosphere to put the reader in the shoes of the main character. If a comic uses too simple of a style, the reader won't be as invested in the environment the character lives in. It's all a matter of what style works best for a particular story.

Max Ernst

There is a woman dancing by a chicken.

In the next picture there is a giant chicken man along with the chicken who is at the woman's bedside.

Next, a woman is being lowered in a coffin while a naked woman watches in horror. I'm not sure which is supposed to be the woman from the first picture or if it is a dream she is having. Now there are two roosters.

The woman awakens in an unfamiliar room filled with statues of naked people. The rooster man is consulting with a hen beside him. Maybe he wants to marry the woman.

Next, it seems like the woman has killed herself in order to escape the rooster and the rooster man is screaming out in agony. Two normal chickens are at the woman's bed.

It looks like the rooster has taken off his suit and put it on the woman. Another woman looks shocked and I think the woman is dead. The rooster is hiding behind the dresser to make an escape.

Maybe the rooster wanted to become human or wanted to marry the woman.

Writing Assignment 1: The Arrival

The Arrival is able to tell its story without using words by following the main character and using emotion, actions, close-ups, setting and mood to show what he is feeling.

From the first page, we learn more about the character through close ups of the objects in his home. The object that we focus on is a family portrait. From panel to panel, the movement of the character shows that he is packing up to leave.

"Camera" movements are used from panel to panel. The most striking is when one panel will show a close-up of an object, and the next panels will "zoom out" from the object and show more information about the setting the character is in. For example, on page 16 the first panel is the family portrait, and the next panels move back to reveal that the man is on a ship.

Even when there is no dialogue, the expressions of the characters show what they are feeling. On page 38 the artist is able to show a conversation without using any words by using expressions and hand gestures. We can gather that the two people talking are having trouble understanding each other because the man in the hat has to draw up a picture to express what he is trying to find.

Since the story is about an immigrant, the artistic decision to leave out all dialogue makes sense because it puts the reader into the shoes of a person coming to a new land and experiencing the unfamiliar. Instead of explaining through dialogue, the story uses images that allow the reader to connect the dots of the plot.