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.