BurbanBlog

Week Eleven; Pride of Baghadad  This story damn. You really feel for these lions. The feeling of being raised, or removed from something that is natural, learning s whole new way of life, and then having to as they described in the book, unlearn everything. It’s very hard and painful and your are constantly second guessing your decisions; will this get me back to where I once was? Will this best serve me? Can I become wild and true again? These lions go through these things and you really begin to root for them, feel with them, hope you with them. You watch as they service together, learn to we together, and watch their first free sunset together, all to be cut short by American shooters...how original....

Week Eleven; BONE Bone was an amusing, bluntly and subtlety sarcastic work. Cleverly placed in the world of living bones with such names as Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone. There is humor and innocent reality in most of the work. Clever plays on situation and characters involved very similar to Space Jams now is them and then was past scene. Clever, mind bending, fun, laughably enjoyable.

WEEK TEN; Jodorowsky Moebius The Black Incal This story was a welcome change of pace as far as our stories are concerned. We've been delving pretty deeply into stories with real life parallels which have been eye opening don't get me wrong, I personally never realized how heavy comics books could be, and I certainly never realized they could be close to biographical. The Black Incal was a welcome diversion though. It felt like I was reading about a character that would be played by Harrison Ford, bitter, salty, not on any particular side merely out to serve himself. It was fun, really out there, crazy ridiculous, and a lot of fun. The design of the comic was fascinating as well. You look at the first few panels and you think you are set in the seventeen hundreds, next think you know you are falling off of a bridge titled Suicide Bridge, and the further you fall the more you see about the off planet world and just how strange and twisted it is. It was an incredible intro to th...

Week Nine; March This story was powerful in a different way than some of the stories we've read over this semester. While Maus was powerful, since it had all of it's characters depicted as animals, you as the reader were able to disconnect to a certain degree because it felt like you were reading a fairy tale. This is gave Maus it's power because it was made more palatable to a wider audience. March didn't have the buffer layer of design. This story, even though Maus had the harsher subject matter, felt much more raw and real because of it's truer to life and real person design. Perhaps it had something to do with the recentness of the events with took place in March too. We see clothing, cars, homes, familiar faces and places and this makes us more comfortable and open to what the we are seeing on the page. As for what happens in the tale its self we are confronted with a subject matter which almost completely mirrors what is going on now to a degree. Perhaps no...

This one was a bit hard to read in all honesty. Let me just start by saying, I never fully understood the weight that could be created through comics. So reading Blankets, A Contract with God, and now Maus, has been a real heavy eye opener. This one hits very close to home through family and people I care about. This comic dealt not only with the holocuast, which is in instead, a stupid heavy subject, but it also dealt with the mental health of most of the people who came out of the concentration camps. From leaving the gas on in the stove because the cost is included in the rent, to compulsively straightening everything anyone touches because it’s so important to have some sort of control, the mental pain of the people who survived was suffocating. What is amazing is the mental stress that was passed on to his son as well. Someone who never even was close to the events, walks away from his fathers narrative unable to comprehend or mentally handle the event. Can you even imagine how he...

Well let’s put it this way. Never did I think I’d be permitted, even encouraged, to read such literature. It was certainly interesting, not even because of the subject matter specifically. Because they were made in a time when comics were especially frowned upon the style of artwork went from more refined, to much edgier, harsher, almost a more homemade sense. Since there were so few regulations to keep comics in check what or who was to say that artists couldn’t do, make, or write whatever they wanted in them. This brings us to the subject matter. Oh the subject matter. Put aside the fact that there was sex galor, the comics were rebellious, wild, untamed. This reflected the time period they were created, the hippy 70s. Era of flower children, rebellion against the system, and complete and utter backlash against the rules and regulations finally crumbling from the 50s and 60s. The wide array of styles and unusual subject matter just goes to prove the pendulum will always swing from on...

WEEK FIVE; Contract With God This collection of stories were interestingly raw. Something about the graphic novels, they never seem to hide any of the earl raw emotion they are feeling. The very first story is about an elderly gentleman who feels God had betrayed him. In a time when life was so hard, what a genuine raw, brutal truth. It’s something that we can relate to even today. When we loose something, a child, we question how it’s possible that God would let such a thing happen. Such a collection of stories, from a drunkard who beats his wife, to people excited to go on vacation after a time of such little extravagance. It is raw, genuine, so truthful that you can’t run from it. It is not something you read to forget about the realities of life, more to find the humor in reality.