Manga. One of the most widely accepted forms of comics (by its home land at least.) With dozens of weekly, monthly, and quarterly magazines to choose from spanning all demographics and genres, manga makes up a massive share of all printed and digital literature consumed in Japan. Shoujo for young girls, Shounen for young boys, Seinen for adult males, Josei for adult females. With these rigid demographic based genres placed in the early days of the industry, the stage has ultimately changed very little. Osamu Tezuka is a legend amongst Manga enthusiasts. The Walt Disney of japan. He pioneered the manga industry and set the standards that it still follows to this day. One of the standards he set is respecting your audience. Primarily a shounen writer, his stories aimed at children contained themes of death, class struggle, war, brutality, distopya, class struggle - all packaged within an adorable and iconic art style. His buddha series deals with all of the above within...
Comics by women: Different perspectives. (12 points) Back in elementary school, I always assumed that girls were better artists then boys, since girls had some pretty nice handwriting while us boys often got work sent back to us because the teacher couldn’t read our chicken scratch. Even today, I attend an art school where my female peers outnumber the males by quite a large margin. As such, it makes me wonder how many great artists were suppressed throughout history because they were women. Picasso, Dali, Da Vinci - All men hailing from a time when art made by women was not publicly accepted and this left out of the pages of history. Today however things are finally different and girl creatives can finally have their work published and recognized by the public. Reading the featured comics this week has my interests for varied perspectives piqued. This One Summer by Jillian and Marika Tamaki is a really interesting coming of age story exploring a wide range of e...
Some of my earliest memories of graphic literature are from the Geronimo Stilton books I read back in elementary school. I guess you could classify them as an illustrated novel, since the pages would alternate between having drawings and then words, going back and forth with the occasional spread to emphasize a climax in the story. Most stories were self-contained, and the first spread of every book had an illustration of Geronimo’s workplace showing off all the characters of the series, and each book that you read you’d be able to recognize more of them. The reason I bring this up is because the work I chose to read this week, Jeff Smith’s bone, gives me very similar vibes to the Geronimo Stilton franchise. They do differ in one way though, while Stilton feels like an evolution of a picture storybook like Goodnight Moon or If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Bone feels like an extension of a comics strip like peanuts or Ducktales. The humor is quick and snappy, most of it being driven by...
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