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?