Podcast/Comimc

Had a little trouble editing, so apologizing in advance for how completely unnatural I sound at times in this thing.
Also, there's a link to my comic. I used a website, and didn't realize until I was done, that I had to pay in order to print it...



https://www.pixton.com/ca/comic/okhaxdkj

Hey, I was not able to edit, so here is a playlist of short clips of me saying some words.

"Gradually Getting Higher"

Hello Classmates,
I have the posting of my comic below. 

I have always hated prefaces like, "I can't draw" so I'll refrain (I mean, I'm an Lit major after all) and let my crude drawing/graphic design/everything speak for itself.
If you can't read some text, I recommend zooming in on your browser (sorry kids!)
This was hard! Subject was more nuanced than I could give credit to, images all weird sizes... But still, you get the idea.

Side note: I borrow images from the following sources

• だんだん高くなる by 40mP for all of the images of the falling little girl.
• And also this image of a dead wombat (apparently?) whose original source I can't locate. 

"Welcome to Writing the Unthinkable": Introduction to Materiality and Lynda Barry

Hello everyone.
I have embd below my podcast on Lynda Barry.
I'm engaging with two of Lynda Barry's texts: "One Hundred Demons" as well as "What it Is", and taking elements from Hillary Chute's "Graphic Women" to serve as an introduction to her layered compositions that engage with topics of materiality and trauma.

For anyone interested in seeing the author engage with these and other topics, I have a few more links below. I highly recommend them-- she's quite fun:

• Lynda Barry's InkTalks segment "The Answer is in the Picture" 
• Lynda Barry's University of Michigan Lecture "Accessing the Imaginary"
• Her general website with materials, and upcoming works @ Drawn and Quarterly 

Josh Neufeld Interview

I have the link to the lengthy interview I kept referencing today in class, for those interested.

http://www.c-span.org/video/?288624-1/book-discussion-ad-new-orleans-deluge

When the Levees Broke Parts 1 & 2

Hello Classmates,

Professor Glaser mentioned When the Levees Broke, a documentary about Hurricane Katrina earlier in the year, but since it's not on Netflix anymore, I wanted to share the copies I found on YouTube.

I imagine this will be a great background piece to watching before our reading of A.D. After the Deluge. 

The copy I found is split into two parts below. 

Best!
AC

A bit on comics layout (just in time, right?)

Hi classmates.

This is just a vaguely supplemental tidbit, if you're interested!

My instructor for a Japanese pop culture course posted this announcement:

"I found an article about explaining the difference of structure by professional and non-professional.
The left side (professional or basic) shows the location and different angles so that readers will be able to understand the circumstance. The second frame (line 2, right) emphasizes on the face of one the girls, and we know who is the main person in this story.
On the other hand, the right side (non-professional or face-based manga) does not provide such information besides the conversation, so readers will need to imagine the situation (just like a novel).
The left side (professional or basic) shows the location and different angles so that readers will be able to understand the circumstance. The second frame (line 2, right) emphasizes on the face of one the girls, and we know who is the main person in this story.
On the other hand, the right side (non-professional or face-based manga) does not provide such information besides the conversation, so readers will need to imagine the situation (just like a novel)."

I can't translate the explanation in the picture word for word (sorry folks!) but I guess I simply wanted to post this image so we could kind of get an idea of difference and nuance in the visual narrative.

Like some techniques in the panel on the left that show that we should play particular attention to the girl we get the shot of, to create drama/suspense, and the long angle that establishes setting.

I found it curious that the second version of the narrative is called more "novel-like" by making the reader do a lot of the work-- where to put weight, what to focus on... the reader also has to place the speakers in time and space because of the blank background. 

This is the speech translation though. Note that it's the same exact speech bubbles in both examples:

Girl A: "It seems like there’s always someone watching me.

I’m feeling uneasy.”

Girl B: “It’s your imagination!”

Girl A: “Oh… really.”

Girl B: “It’s surely just because you’re tired.”

Girl A: “I hope so, but…”

*SFX next to alien* Stare….

There may be connotations of which is more "skilled" in the sense of this comparison, but the question to think why and when we might utilize the second form and by extension where we've seen examples of the first and second form in our course readings. (The Property I feel like, was very much like the second example.)

Side note: If anyone knows the exact definition of what a "顔マンガ/Kao Manga/Face Manga" is, please let us know, right? That's what the second panels are an example of.

In the meantime, have a great weekend!
AC

Podcast 101

For one of your course projects, I will ask you to make a short podcast on a topic of your choice. To begin the process, I am adding a number of links about the process to help you get started.

 Lifehacker Guide to Podcast Construction

Another prof's step-by-step guide to making his own podcast
 
Audacity Wiki

Topics Discussed Today--With Links!

As usual, we had a lovely and far-ranging discussion that covered a lot of topics you might like to explore. With that in mind, our first post-class link and topic list:

Dismaland

Jewish figurines in Poland

Heritage Tourism:

Intro from MSU museum

Cultural Heritage Tourism essay collection

March of the Living

Co-optation Theory:

Theory of Absolute Co-Optation

From Manufacturing Consent

Great Book on Co-Optation--Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool

Restitution, the documentary

                                                  Recovered painting by Gustav Klimt stolen during WW II

Story behind The Woman in Gold

Holocaust Claims

Curation and Historical Trauma

Polish Jewish History Museum

Camp Joy historical re-enactments

If you can think of anything I've missed, please make your own post!

Helpful Articles

Just wanted to share some articles I read recently that I thought others might be interested in, and might be useful if anyone uses "traditional" comics or the Magneto comic as material for any of our projects. I  found a PDF that looks at the psychology of superheroes, and goes more in-depth regarding the Magneto-Malcolm X parallel that has been made. 

Also thought I would throw in this article regarding how comics became political, because it references some other works we will be reading during the semester. 

Lastly, I thought this was interesting, as we are reading some things by Ta-Nehisi Coates and it's been announced that he will be writing Black Panther comics for Marvel. The article discusses race, mostly in terms of Black Panther's character but also discusses comics as a medium that is perhaps more inclusive, than say, film.

Thanks,

Brit

Phenomenological Process in Radioactive

Hello folks! 

So I'm actually quite upset that I missed the last discussion of Radioactive and I really wanted to bring up something about Phenomenology (visual media theory) and apply it to some of the really expressionistic, color-dominant compositions of the text. I'm no expert-- I just remember this concept from a DAAP course on Visual Media theory circa 2014. 
In short, it's a way to talk about very subjective experiences like "affect" and "feeling" and a "sense of" in a sort of critical, theory-based approach.
It's especially interesting to read some of the images in Radioactive from this perspective when we think about Redniss' emphasis on the process of creation, and how she stacked sketches and compositions from all different moments (even with loaded meaning from her own experiences-- remember that jazz performance from her lecture?)  to combine them in an evocative sense. 

"In simple terms, Nancy helps us move from a phenomenology that is a description of the senses (I saw this, I heard this, I felt this) to one that is a Phenomenology of affect. Affect is a term that refers to the more liminal and less clearly defined qualities of experience. Affect is frequently reduced to emotion, and this is a good starting point, but affect can refer to the domain of impressions, intuition, memories, imagination or even the feeling that hangs in a room. In theatre and performance we work on an affective level all the time: affect is what is conveyed in between the words or gestures. It is the unspoken. Sometimes it falls between the senses too, or goes beyond them. Affect is also a sort of exchange of forces between people, or between people and objects, the outer world or structures. It has been called a shimmer or a ripple. Phenomenologies of affect can include set design, costumes, music, lighting, etc. What we in performance use to create the ‘feel or mood’ of a piece." (From this lecture of Swedish scholar Kozel.)

Basically, Redniss draws upon this Phenomenology of Affect in the creation of her pages. Just how she said every component of this book carries meaning, even her process does as well, for it harnesses forces of the "unseen" (mood, affect, a "sense of") and conveys it.  

And as a text that feels mildly encyclopedic, it adds a layer of nuance, talking back to thinking of history or biography as a series of facts, this phenomenological process speaks to how we can (responsibly) talk about real people (e.g. their body) that we can never really know. 

Perhaps reading the text with this active, heavy authorship we can make sense of why pages follow one another. Redniss actually visited and interviewed subjects of Hiroshima, for example, and the transcript is distinctly marked by her affective response to this, in conjunction with her project. 

In final quote of the biography I think we have something that speaks a lot to this sense of knowing via sensation. These subjectively coded things like memory and associated feeling and image are coded into the brain, and in that sense, that person "lives" via these sensations. (This is on page 180)
Parallel this to her process: colors, lines, expressionistic drawing coded by her lived experience and collected onto a page to convey meaning-- this person embodied via subjective sensation. 
The final image of the book is a curious choice-- it's this very orange composition, right? Oozing sexuality. Warm tones-- a sense of a warm glowing, as opposed to the stark X-ray blue type compositions. 
So we have this contrast between the phenomenological experience of knowing a person (page 180) vs. scientific expressions of our materiality void of sensation (see pages like 186) and she chose to end her examination of Curie with this image.
(side note: think of this with the death scene, and how she talked about how she struggled to understand and convey it, after reading the emotional accounts of the family and witnesses)



Anyway! Best weekend to everyone. 
AC

Further Comics Resources

I think McCloud will be very useful to us this term, but there is a growing body of comics theory on which we can draw this semester, as well.  Below are links to some resources that might be of interest to those of you with both scholarly and artistic investment in comics.

Hillary Chute's Graphic Women

A Comics Studies Reader, Ed. Jeet Heer and Ken Worcester

Michael Chaney's Graphic Subjects

Jared Gardner's Projections: Comics and The History of 21st Century Storytelling

Frederick Aldama's Multicultural Comics

Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics

Thierry Groensteen's The System of Comics

Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art

Neil Cohn's The Visual Language of Comics

Randy Duncan's The Power of Comics

Are comics a medium or a genre? Why does it matter?

Read the following excerpt from Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics about the question of whether comics (it sounds strange to make it singular, I know) is a medium or a genre. What is the difference between a medium and a genre? Why does Wolk suggest it matters which one we label comics?  What does he mean by "highbrow" comics?  Can we put a work like Spiegelman's Maus, with which we begin the semester, and Archie (seen above) alongside one another?

Welcome!

Welcome to the Capstone course in comics and graphic novels! I'll look forward to getting to know you this semester. I will use this blog to post materials related to the books we're reading and the topics we're covering. Soon, I will add your email addresses to the author list on this site, so that you can also post when you see something relevant to our course work or comics/ visual culture more generally.

Cheers!