....et, Trois!

So, I didn’t completely hate X-Men. I swear. Despite the fact that I detested the writing style, I found myself really caught up in the plot. I wanted to keep reading after the last page – and that drawing at the back of the book of what the cover of 138 would have looked like if Jean had lived just teased me more! So, yes, even though, again, the writing was bad, the movement of the plot was well-done.

And, though the way women were portrayed was less than to my taste, I did enjoy the art. I thought that the artist was especially good at using color to his advantage – like on pages 78-79, I liked the red & orange panels with Wolverine, I thought that was particularly effective in matching his violence. The artist uses similar methods throughout in various places, using color to enhance the emotional tone of the scene – another example is early on, on page 11, the first frame of the page. It’s interesting, taking into account that these comics are from the earlier era in comics printing that McCloud talked about, where there were limited colors to work with – but this artist managed to make them really effective.

Numero Deux

Okay, so I don’t want to come off as a super-feminist, uber-activist girl. And I know that the main audience of these comics is young men. But, seriously. The way women’s bodies are portrayed here (and in a lot of comics, actually) is rather...gross. And unnecessary.

Take, for example, the image on page 51, where all we get of Jean is the left side of her butt. 1) If the artist wanted to establish that Jean’s perspective by placing the point of view behind her, why don’t we instead see a whole-body shot? Or her shoulder? Or the back of her head? And 2) This is a good example of a tactic used in advertising, where the woman is portrayed as being a fragment of her own body (think of the add where Serena Williams is talking about I don’t even know what, but she’s only shown from the neck down).

Also, I was surprised when, on flipping through the book the second or third time, when I came across page 54, where we see Jean...and her nipple. Yeah. It’s right there. Again, how is this necessary? Aren’t the skin-tight spandex costumes/dresses-with-the-fronts-missing (Candy, page 60, Jean page 68) revealing enough? Why go that extra step?

Now, I can’t completely trash the way the women are drawn here. In comparison to the fantasy series Soul Saga that I read part of, for instance, these women are old-fashioned and modest. Which may have something to do with when this was written. But the women’s bodies are actually fairly realistic in proportion – they actually have hips! And the most important bits are always covered. Ant, to be fair, the men are shown quite scantily clad as well in some parts (Wolverine is shown pretty much naked on page 157). It’s just unfortunate that it’s only getting worse as the medium progresses - again, in some cases; I’ve in no way read enough comics to make any general statements.

Anyway...there’s my rant. I really should write something about what I did like about it, huh?

Les X-Men, Numero Un

Well, before I start my rant-post about how much reading this hurt me, I should let it be known that my previous experience with the X-men is limited to watching the cartoon when I was a kid (and from which I retained not much more than the names of the main characters) and the movies (which I’m assuming, though I don’t know for sure, were probably not all that close to the comics, because that’s what movies do). So, I’m taking the Dark Phoenix Saga as something that stands alone here. I don’t know any of the background, or any of what comes after. So it is a little bit difficult to see how it’s working in the greater plot. But, anyway. Here I go.

Okay, so maybe I’m being horribly snobbish here. But the writing in this was horrible! Now, taking into consideration that this was fairly early on in the development on modern comics as we know it today, I’m sure that for its time, it probably wasn’t so bad. Also, its general audience probably didn’t care so much about the methods by which the characters were developed or plot points were established, but I guess I just wasn’t expecting it to be so...bad. Claremont has absolutely no subtlety. The way he shifts scenes, the way he establishes the characters’ attributes – it’s all so blunt. For example, on page 81 when the scene changes, he writes “On that note, let’s shift our scene to an upstairs library...” Thanks, Chris Claremont, for ripping me completely and unceremoniously out of the story. Or, on page 102, when Beast thinks “That’s the spirit, McCoy. Hide your feelings behind a flip, devil-may-care façade.” Or, how just in general, the characters must give a blow-by-blow account of what they’re doing in every battle, along with a summation of what their powers are, just in case we forgot. (Storm, page 162: “The limited environment within this crater will make it hard for me to effectively use my powers. I won’t have sufficient atmospheric “tools” to work with” – couldn’t she have just said something like “the environment here is making it hard for me to use my powers”?).

Reading this was a far cry from the quiet, subtle methods we saw in LeMire’s work, where pictures and actions served to tell the bulk of the story – in Dark Phoenix, the writing was far too expository/cheesy/repetitive for my taste. But that’s just me. Some people in class will probably chew me out if they read this. What can I say, I’m a writing snob.

just a quick thought...

Someone in one of the earlier Blackboard posts mentioned something about video games being a story-telling medium closely related to comics, and in response Dan mentioned Zelda (and mentioning is all it takes for me, really). I love Zelda. With a passion bordering on obsession, and it is a very unfortunate series of circumstances that has made it impossible for me to play any of the early games (meaning, I don't have the early systems on which to play them - *sad face*). Anyway. The thought I was trying to come around to was - I think it would be the most awesome thing to happen in the history of forever if someone made a Zelda comic. The End. And, yes, my profile icon is Midna from Twilight Princess. :)

LOLz

Wow. I found this picture on engrish.com - it's a website that has a bunch of different things like this that have been mistranslated in other countries. Yeah.

Aaaanyway, I was in Augusta yesterday at Barnes & Noble and I really wanted to go to the graphic novel section. I stared at the shelf longingly from afar even. But then my friend who was with me pulled me away. :(

So, I finished reading Understanding Comics. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about it. It definitely made me apply a lot of concepts to comics that I really hadn't thought of before, like when he talks about iconography and the implications behind "cartooning" vs. "realism". And I thought the historic elements he talked about were really interesting, as well as the differences between eastern and western comics - again, I was aware of the cultural differences he talked about, like the eastern emphasis on the cycles of nature and balance, but I had never thought to relate that to comics. I'd like to read more about that, actually.

On the other hand...a lot of what McCloud was saying didn't seem to get him anywhere. It felt like he was presenting these topics in order to come to some greater conclusion, but in the end I didn't think he really accomplished that, and I lost sight of what his message exactly was. Even when he was trying to defend his position on his definition of comics, he ends up contradicting himself - "Our attempts to define comics are an on-going process which won't end anytime soon. A new generation will no doubt reject whatever this one finally decides to accept and try once more to re-invent comics. And so they should." So, he's saying that even though he thinks his definition should be "reinvented,” he's still going to explain it anyway. It just seems a little less than productive, I guess. Like, maybe he just wants to talk and needs an excuse. But, like I said,
he did make me think more broadly about comics, even though people who aren't as new to comics probably didn't glean that much from it.