Phoenix Osamu Tezuka

I read Phoenix Dawn the first of the volumes, and I was very interested in it. I have always had a liking for manga and anime, but I couldn’t read some just because of the pure tropes that were consistent in other manga’s.

The basic premise of all of the volumes is to somehow gain immortality, and it comes from the phoenix. Sounds like a pretty typical epic story with lots of obstacles and interesting characters on the way.  The time frame that comes with each volume jumps further into the future, for example the first book Dawn starts out in pre Japan that is historically accurate, to the future, which is usually fiction. This play with the past and future allows for a lot of creativity and realism being combined, for something to relate too.

I started to realize after I had read half of the first volume that the when I was reading summaries of the other volumes it seemed to have a reoccurring themes. It was all essentially trying to tell the reader something.

Artwork for the story was all right, a little out dated but sometimes I can really enjoy that classic manga look.

Heavy Metal

I have always been familiar with Heavy Metal, especially when I was young, maybe it seemed so appealing to me because of the grungy and occasional r rated content. Heavy Metal 2000 was my first introduction to the Heavy Metal genre, when I started to read the comics I was opened up to a whole new world of Heavy Metal.

Moebius is the artist that did all of Heavy Metal and is an excellent French comic artist, the change in styles throughout each comic happens often which gives the comic versatility between each of the stories. Several short stories are involved in each Heavy Metal comic, which I think is an excellent way to keep focus and interest when reading, although you can’t get attached to a character like a super hero comic would. The overall feel of the work is very different compared to a typical comic and the stories are very imaginative.

March, book one

What struck me most was the choice of artwork and layout of the pages. Each frame correlated with the text flawlessly, even using the space of the page to say something without text. For example when Rosa Parks made her presence in the comic, the bus that she rode on was alone on a page and used as more of an icon of history rather than a direct representation of a simple bus. 

I noticed the use of solid black pages, they stood out so well because of the boldness and difference from a typical white page, this I feel the artist was trying to make a point, but subtly. 

The use of black also had a way of displaying a memory or link to the past, putting an importance to the page. 

Characterization in the comic was representational but with a twist of personality, each person seemed to be showing some stereotype based from culture, but the majority I felt was represented in a somewhat equal way. The more I read the comic, the more I started to feel a real sense of what the time period was like, and what the black community had to go through. I’ll be excited to read the second installment of the book, and will definitely recommend this comic to anyone.

Maus

A striking image of a swastika and a stylized mouse in the center looking like Hitler. Maus had the same feeling to it with the scenery and emotions from the characters as the movie Shindlers List had. I related it to this movie a lot actually, yes because both types are about the Holocaust but just the pure depression that I felt from viewing this novel. Excellently written with lots of descriptive texts tell the truth of what happened in the holocaust.

I believe the books intentions are to show history as it happened and describe situations that victims of the holocaust had to endure.

The artwork isn’t my favorite. Actually I really dis like it, but I can’t say that it is bad, because it certainly isn’t. The novel has line work that is very thick, which actually gave a great representation of how he wanted to use the lines to show emotion and that the burden that this put on people is heavy. It was a very hard book to read, especially with having to connect the two different timelines in the book.

This book has received multiple awards which it deserves but I believe a lot of that is because what it is about and how it impacted the people that read it.

Underground Comics (Robert Crumb The Book of Genesis illustrated)

When a book that is based around the bible and demonstrates a certain section in the Hebrew bible it’s definitely going to make a big impact on the Christian society. In fact The Book of Genesis became #1 bestseller in the New York Times around the Christian book lists. What became an underground comic is now is a popular and well-known novel. 

Crumbs tone in the book is rather orderly in the sense that it doesn’t take much thought to figure out what is going on, the story goes picture by picture depicting what has been said in the bible. Crumb didn’t have any reason to be clever in the novel because it would hinder with the accuracy that he was trying to achieve in the text and the illustration.

Personally I’m not too fond of the illustration in the graphic novel because there isn’t anything to really look at other then it’s a great illustration portraying the scene. It’s almost like this is made to give the younger crowd of Christians an interest into the complicated world of the bible.

Will Eisner, A Contract with God

Well the first thing I will have to say about A Contract with God is that its artwork is incredible, just flipping through the pages briefly I was getting excited to see the future pages. The way the rain was very believable, Eisner knew how to use the correct information when drawing rain. Another thing I noticed was the amount of space he creates in his images, for example on some pages he uses solid black shapes for either a night shot or a dramatic scene, It allows for the eye to assume there are object and things in the blackness. This technique is used in many manga’s I was curious if he was influenced by this.

The overall comic was interesting, quite a depressing graphic novel. The story is broken down into four parts, but the parts all seemed to have a link between each other even though they were individual stories. There is a lot of violence, suicide, racism, sexual content, etc. Eisner used this in his novel because it was a drama that clearly he wanted to say something. Who he wanted to say it to was god, and that he wanted to write a story of himself.