Making Comics and more!
I've really fallen behind, here. But I have been reading:
Jeffrey Brown's Every Girl Is the End of the World for Me is an interesting little autobiographical piece. There's a lot to study for such a small book, especially in how it's drawn and laid out. Like a lot of contemporary stuff, and especially contemporary autobiographical stuff, it doesn't have much in terms of plot arc, and while it comes in as relatively cheap ($8.00), it may not add enough to justify raising the bookstore bill. But when I get to my shopping spree next month (I hope), I should pick up at least one of Brown's books to have on hand as an example, and I can still think about slipping it in.
McCloud's Making Comics deserves more than I'll have time to give it here. It's not on the list for the course--I'll use Understanding Comics at least for the first few semesters, but MC is more designed for a course in comics-creation than comics-reading. Still, there's useful stuff there, and I suspect that this volume will always be the other thing besides UC that McCloud is recognized for. (Reinventing Comics will always be the forgotten member of that trilogy, as McCloud seems to recognize.) I enjoyed reading it a lot. It's very "McCloud" in all kinds of ways, and packed with good stuff.
Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese has sprung right up to the "must use" list. If I don't put it on the syllabus in comics, I'll use it in one of my other classes. It's interesting structurally in the way three disparate stories are revealed to all be one story, it's very interesting to look at, and thematically it's timely and important. I've just got to figure out where I want to use it.
Sometime soon I should do a post in which I think through some of the "obvious choices" like Maus and Persepolis to see where I stand on them. There's only so much time in the semester, and more important, only so high I can drive the bookstore bill.
Jeffrey Brown's Every Girl Is the End of the World for Me is an interesting little autobiographical piece. There's a lot to study for such a small book, especially in how it's drawn and laid out. Like a lot of contemporary stuff, and especially contemporary autobiographical stuff, it doesn't have much in terms of plot arc, and while it comes in as relatively cheap ($8.00), it may not add enough to justify raising the bookstore bill. But when I get to my shopping spree next month (I hope), I should pick up at least one of Brown's books to have on hand as an example, and I can still think about slipping it in.
McCloud's Making Comics deserves more than I'll have time to give it here. It's not on the list for the course--I'll use Understanding Comics at least for the first few semesters, but MC is more designed for a course in comics-creation than comics-reading. Still, there's useful stuff there, and I suspect that this volume will always be the other thing besides UC that McCloud is recognized for. (Reinventing Comics will always be the forgotten member of that trilogy, as McCloud seems to recognize.) I enjoyed reading it a lot. It's very "McCloud" in all kinds of ways, and packed with good stuff.
Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese has sprung right up to the "must use" list. If I don't put it on the syllabus in comics, I'll use it in one of my other classes. It's interesting structurally in the way three disparate stories are revealed to all be one story, it's very interesting to look at, and thematically it's timely and important. I've just got to figure out where I want to use it.
Sometime soon I should do a post in which I think through some of the "obvious choices" like Maus and Persepolis to see where I stand on them. There's only so much time in the semester, and more important, only so high I can drive the bookstore bill.
posted by Carl at 4:49 AM
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