BurbanBlog

WEEK THREE; Flash Gordon and the Peanuts Not gonna lie, getting through Flash Gordon was a bit of a struggle towards the middle. Let me explain, he and his fiancé were having their tender moment and it was a little hard not to want to put the comic down for a second. The sense of superiority I felt coming from Flash as he spoke to her was almost unbarable. Especially when they were saying their last goodbye and he states that she will be fine because she has to pick out all of the house ware for after the wedding. Yikes! Along with this, there is the issue of very flat, one dimensional characters not unlike Superman. However, when I stepped back for a moment and looked at the comic from a slightly broader stance, it felt important to count a little bit of history into this. This was written in the 1950’s when women, along side other races, were seen as almost the inferior. This can be seen in Flash through his fiancé and the way he treats women in general. It can also be seen through

WEEK ONE; The Arrival I’d never been exposed to such a comic book as this. I didn’t even know they existed. When I first opened it I was possitive it was s hostile alien fantastical story. Boy was I wrong. After sitting in class listening to everyone discussion and reading it myself I’m left in aw. The way the author creates a familiar world and makes it seem completely foreign, how he relates to someone who feels alone and friendless, how he makes us as the reader feel the same is astounding. I love too the way he creates a visual language allowing us as the reader to never be confused once it is decoded. And I love the way he communicates visually to us as the viewer the sense of home each character is able to find through their pets. Having a pet and having had moved several times throughout live having something, even someone who can relate is such a powerful and well used element. It is a well thought out and ingeniously thought through comic.

Understanding Comics I went home this week and read Understanding Comics. Not only was it extremely informative in a fun and highly engaging way, I found myself asking a lot of personal questions, which I confess, I hadn’t expected. In the comic we are provoked to look at comic books themselves in a different way. We are pushed to see them as literature, works which took almost more thought, planning, and a great deal more work overall than any works of literature. Yet, even with all this, all myself and many people I’ve nerded out with about them, only tend to see comic books as still films. Merely pictures on paper. Pictures that occasionally have a moral and intricate story line on the surface. This brings me to another interesting thing I found about the comic, they point out how comics are so much more than just what I or many of my friends have taken them for. They are an art form and visual and literary art form. What’s even more amazing are the people who make them. There are

 Interpreting and Understanding Max Ernst’s Illustrations. Working in class we were instructed to interpret several of Ernst’s pieces. Each had its own portion of a narrative to share. The first being the women with her chicken. She appeared to be dancing or attempting to scare the chicken off of the ball on which it sat. The second piece was a bird ma standing over what appeared to be the dead body of a women. He seemed to be mourning her or bidding her goodnight. The third image showed several humanistic animals surrounding a women in a grave.  Either mourning or there to see her off. Two animal men sit aside a nude women. They are admiring a cloth perhaps trying to decide if it is fitting for the women to wear or are contemplating feasting on her. The fifth image shows a ma in his own blood laying on the floor with an individual either rejoicing or in shock to find his or her employer dead on the floor. Image six showed a ma; pinned against a dresser with a rooster behin