Week Four: The Comic Book

from a Tintin comic

Comic books are a form of comic that I didn't relate to as well growing up as a kid. I have never really been interested in superhero comics, which made up the majority of the comic books I had access to as a kid, and I never read the Archie comic books, either. Actually, the only comic books I ever read as a kid were the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comic books, which...well... it is what it is.

Sonic and Tails are fighting!

Anyways, I'm not proud of it, but there you go.

Even as bad as they were, I think reading the Sonic comics when I was younger really helped fuel my fire as far as being interested in comics goes. I loved all the character designs, colors and worldbuilding they had going on, and it made me want to create my own stories and design my own characters-- which I did, and for a really long time that was one of the things I loved to do most. I have tons and tons of bins filled with old weird character designs and story notes that I was all trying to turn into comics (none of them made it to the finished product, of course, but coming up with the stories was really my favorite part anyways).

In class we passed around some comic books, and I got my hands on a couple of war comics. Now, I'm not that into war comics at all, and especially not war comics done in the style of an action-hero comic book. I think my favorite war comic that I've ever read was Notes for a War Story, by Gipi.

Anyways, this comic was pretty interesting in the way that it was clearly not intended for children. The subject matter was extremely heavy and the content was pretty violent and definitely not kid friendly at all. I could tell that it was intended for an older audience, maybe even an audience that is at the age where they have relatives or even they themselves can relate to a war environment. I think this is one of my favorite things about comic books is that they can be made for people of all ages-- just like regular books can!!!

All and all I acknowledge and appreciate the appeal of comic books and their ability to tell longer-form stories, but I think the majority of the genres represented in Western comic books are just not the kind of genres that I am interested in (which is why I enjoy manga a lot more than most western comics books).

Week Three: The Comic Strip

Comic strips are one of my favorite mediums for comics, and the medium that very first got me into reading and drawing comics in the first place. I feel that I owe much of the joy in my life to my early days of reading the comic strips in the newspaper every day. This led me to reading certain comic books, western and otherwise, which eventually led me to the path that I continue to try and follow today of making comics.

Growing up, I'll admit it, I was a huge Garfield fan. I also loved other ones that appeared in my newspaper every day, like Get Fuzzy, Curtis, Pearls Before Swine, Shoe, and of course, Calvin and Hobbes. As I got older, I fell more into reading all kinds of different manga-- though as I entered college I became re-introduced to all kinds of amazing old comic strips and where they originated from. I was exposed to the long, beautiful, artful pages of Little Nemo, as well as the poetic comedy that was Krazy Kat. I had no idea about any of these comics when I was younger, but if I had, I was sure that I would have loved them. I was very much drawn back in to the comic form that I originally had fallen in love with in the first place, and I am still having a blast exploring all of the undiscovered goldmines of comic strips that I simply haven't been exposed to yet.

This week I chose to dive back into Calvin and Hobbes. Reading it as an adult, I find, is an entirely different experience than as a kid. When I was younger I focused on all the quick gags and the silly situations that Calvin and his tiger got themselves into. Now that I am older, the short, lucid moments in the comic are not lost on me. Truly one of the greatest strips in history.
Calvin and Hobbes is a concept that never got stale, or tired. Calvin always picked on the same girl, had the same childish stubbornness all kids his age have, had the same exasperated parents, the same lackadaisical tiger friend. I think what this strip has that others don't is an honest exploration of all the different facets of kidhood (which are countless) tied into the lucid thoughts a kid might have that marks the passage of time and his transition into an older, more thoughtful person. Every adult reading this comic had gone through this, and Watterson's beautiful ability to tell a concise story (or rather, a small, concise piece of a story) complimented the ideals he wanted to portray with grace. I know I just used a ton of flowery language, but I feel like out of the strips that deserve the attention, Calvin and Hobbes is unanimously one.

I personally want to delve back into comic strips a bit more-- concise storytelling is one of the best exercises you can do for yourself in comics.