Sara Miner Literature of Comics

Compared to what I feel most people associate with the word comics, Maus is a very emotional and different piece of literature. People think more of fantasy worlds and things that are unrealistic to what goes on in the real world, so for someone to take such a shocking and serious topic like the holocaust is a pretty genius thing. My high school literature class was based around graphic novels and for a good portion of a semester we focused on Maus I and II in order to introduce us to learning visual symbolism and how they changed the public's view of comics for the better. I genuinely enjoyed reading maus, because it gives a real personal view of the experience of the holocaust while showing how the holocaust and the issues that came with it are brought to the modern day.

What is your response to the text you just read? The text that I chose to read is Batman Killing the Joker. Going into this reading, I didn't really know what to expect because Batman is supposed to have a rule set for himself to not kill people, so seeing the title I was kind of taken aback. And even after reading the story I'm still a bit confused about the title of it since neither of them died in the end. It only ended with the both of them laughing together about a joke that the Joker told, the joke seems to be symbolic of the relationship that Batman and Joker have come to at this point. Joker has made the leap to insanity and he only just has to wait for Batman to take the leap after him, but he won't do it on Joker's terms since he doesn't trust him and he considers himself to be sane. What connections did you make with the story that you read? Discuss the elements with which you were able to connect. I found it pretty hard to connect with this story...

Reading underground comics was a pretty big shock considering just how tame mainstream comics were. I feel like superhero comics and what's sold commercially are read to see what sort of life society would be best to live and then underground comics are more of a guilty pleasure to make the reader feel like they're not the only ones having those sort of thoughts under the surface. Their purpose is more so for the creator to just get al of their thoughts out creatively. Kind of like throwing a bunch of darts at a target all at once, the more you throw the higher the chance of hitting the target.

With comics gaining more commercial popularity among average people, the comic industry started to outgrow the limitations of the comic strip format. Through the growth of consumption of comics came a sort of need for comic creators to find a new format for conveying their ideas. This need for innovation fostered the creation of what we call today the Graphic Novel. I read A Contract with God, a graphic novel from the man that coined that term, Will Eisner. Through this work, the difference between more commercialized comics like superhero stories and strips became very clear. The subject matter became darker and more akin to real life rather than a romanticized story or joke with an impossible punchline. There became much more writing and character depth, much like a real novel, and the art felt as though there were less limitations because there was more of a focus on the mood of each panel than there was on fitting a certain style to make it more marketable.

I never really read into superhero comics much as a kid cause I thought it was a boy thing and I just never had access to them. As I grew older and heard other people talking about them and their movie adaptations, I wanted to know more about them and get more into them, but now that I've actually read some of them I don't think I should be all that sad about never reading them before. I had read the Batman Dark Knight series before for a high school english class and thought it was cool, so knowing now how those comics used to be before getting freed up by the sort of Graphic Novel movement was pretty shocking. I thought the Adam West batman show was sort of exaggeratingly simple for a reason but its surprising to see that that's just kinda how superheroes were made out to be in the beginning.

The comic that I focused on reading during class is the Garfield strip. I found it interesting that the strip originally had more characters than just Jon, Garfield and the occasional appearance from Odie. It felt like the humor used to be much more based around cynical jokes about Jon, but as the comic progressed and time passed by the jokes became centered around Garfield and the humor became much less dry. The jokes seem very fueled by the words rather than mostly on visuals, since there are full speech bubbles on most of the panels.

Something that McCloud talked about in "Understanding Comics" that stood out to me as intriguing was when he was explaining how our brains look at something and only remember a simplified version of that thing and fills in the informational gap with what is familiar to us. I had never thought before about why cartoony drawings of things are more appealing to us than the familiarity of a realistically rendered thing, but it's pretty cool to think that it's because I've never had to think about why things are drawn the way they are before.