One throughline found within several of the artists we looked at this week was the concept of getting credit for their work. Jack Kirby for example, was and is known very well by comic fans who have read his works or the works influenced by his pioneering. Today, however, many of the stories he had a large hand in creating are now blockbuster juggernauts but fans of the films have accepted them as the work of the late expert marketer and personality Stan Lee. While Kirby’s name may have slipped through the cracks over the years, the opposite is true for Carl Barks. Fans of the Scrooge McDuck Comics were able to sift through the uncredited strips and identify “The Good Duck Artist” as he was known for years until the comics were released under the names of their creators instead of simply “Disney.” One thing that I like about Bark’s Scrooge comics are his sense of scale and adventure, as well as the motivations of the characters that lead to those adventures. It feels like a...
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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