Week Eight: Stereotypes and the Ethics of Representation

This week we are discussing the use of stereotypes in gaming, animation, and comic culture. I think stereotypes are something that are fought for time and time again by diehard gaming, cartoon and other media enthusiasts, vehemently standing by the fact that they are necessary in order for the point to get across, necessary for people to better understand the more minor parts of a story so that the reader can now focus on the 'bigger picture' that whoever is trying to portray.

I think this is entirely false. I believe that stereotypes are created by people in positions of power and privilege to simplify, delegitimize and dehumanize them. I think that they're a lazy excuse not to do more research, be more inclusive, or make any attempt at opening up the gaming, animation or comic community to a wider audience. People who think that 'stereotypes exist for a reason' are often the same people who think that games, movies, comics, etc. don't have female protagonists because women don't play games or watch movies or read comics. They're often the same people who think that only white men created beautiful classical works of art, literature and otherwise because women and people of color 'just didn't do stuff like that'. They're often the same people that think that women and people of color still aren't making the best comics or cartoons or games because of no specific reason.

These are the kind of people who are satisfied with the answer 'that's just the way it is' without thinking of why something is that way. They don't look past the reason why stereotypes exist or why classical women/POC painters aren't recognized in history or why every blockbuster movie just has to have a white male main character.

Society actively erases the work of people who aren't the privileged ones in the equation. Many people who have the power to recognize an artist or give a game idea the greenlight or determine if there should be an option to play a woman character as well as a male character in a certain game aren't interested in diversity or being inclusive because they find it inconvenient and threatening to their position in privilege-- because, yes, many of the people who can make these decisions were put there because of their privilege. It's a cycle, and it's not a view that is visible to someone who is on the bottom of the mountain, so to speak.

Stereotypes are created in an arbitrary way and enforced by constant use over generations. It's possible to break down a stereotype by understanding that these traits are ones that people of many different races and genders possess, and instead of being a label for these traits they are simply traits that any kind of human is able to possess. Many great works have been created in the past century by actively going against stereotyping and breaking the boring bounds of what someone thinks would be a normal stereotype. I think there are better ways to immediately communicate an idea besides offensive stereotypes-- and to refer back to them time and time again is a lazy practice. So no, I don't think they are necessary to communicate an idea. There is never a need to be offensive or dehumanize an entire group of people to tell your space opera story.

Week Seven: Legitimation of the Comics

This week, I read volumes 1 & 2 of Maus, by Art Spiegelman. Having never read it before, it became clear to me now why it is considered such an important memoir by many. Maus is a digestible, hard-hitting and very real work by a cartoonist who is documenting the tales of his grandfather who was a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz during WWII. For many, it is sometimes hard to find documents of the war that don't sound so wholly gruesome and unbelievable that it almost seems like a work of fiction. To someone who has never experienced the horrors of war, there can be a disconnect between retellings of the war and fiction they've consumed that seems like war, and the feeling that those two things give.

However, Maus does a great job of making the war seem like something real that happened and affected the people involved as well as their posterity. Because it is told from the eyes of the narrator hearing the story retold from his grandfather, it gives the experience of the war a faraway feel, but at the same time something that really happened as told by someone you trust dearly, like your grandfather.

I think another victory of these comics are the way the characters are represented visually in the book. The characters are different races of animals-- mice, pigs, cats-- representing the ethnicity of the characters. It drives home the point of discrimination and categorization by the Nazis home in a very simple way by doing this. As well as this, by turning the characters into cartoonish animals, it gives the story a level of accessibility that I don't think it would have, had the animals be specific caricatures of the people they represent. With such little identifying features separating them, the reader is able to project themselves and/or their family into the roles of the characters in Maus. I think this feature helps give the comic the level of accessibility it needs in order to reach such a wide audience, as it did.

Week Six: Underground Comix

This week we focused on the underground comics of the '60s. I read a few of Robert Crumb's comics, such as Whiteman and other shorts. I really love the underground comics movement, as I believe it jumpstarted a lot of what I find myself interested in today, being the indie & small-press comic culture. Underground comics were the first time that comics really became open to anyone who wanted to create and publish. No longer did anyone have to depend on big-time comics publishers or newspapers to serialize their comics, as many artists started to show their work in smaller, underground magazines, or simply to self-publish their own work.

That being said, much of the driving force for these creators to make these comics was the Comics Code Authority, which was in essence a censor on comics, not allowing any sort of published comic to show any sort of 'smut'. Underground comics was a way for comics creators to kind of push back and make comics explicitly banned by the code as a way to continue to explore creative freedom through the medium of comics, no matter what the government regulation was. That being said, many underground comics were very explicit, (especially Crumb's) in racial, sexual or drug-related ways. It was the first time that there had been a whole genre of comics that were very strictly for adults; the age-inclusiveness was not at all flexible. I feel that this kind of expanded people's understanding of comics and what they felt could be done in the visual medium of comics.

Crumb created many personal comics as well, which not many creators had done before. He made short comics based on his own personal experience of drug use and otherwise, as well as injected subject matter he found interesting or enthralling into his work (namely, the types of women he seemed to enjoy). This kind of personal touch in comics was something that hadn't been seen as much before this era, and is a trend that continued well into this era of comic creators; many incredible works have been made in the comic field that are memoirs or simply draw on the experience of the artist in a deep way in some form or another.

Week Five: Emergence of the Graphic Novel

This week I read Blankets, by Craig Thompson. I've never read the book in its entirety before, and I was surprised. I didn't expect a religious memoir at first, and I didn't entirely relate, but as I read on I think anyone who has even ever gone to church before (or even, has ever been a teenager or had a first love before) can probably relate to this novel. And honestly, the experience of reading the book isn't even all about whether or not you can relate to the subject material. What is important is that you are experiencing a very deep and personal story that the author has to tell, and he does it in such a down-to-earth and involving way that it's hard not to lose track of time while you are reading this book. I found myself starting to care about Craig's experiences and wonder how this played out and how it affected him later in life.

Blankets brought to mind another graphic novel memoir that stands out strongly in my mind to this day-- Stitches, by David Small. Stitches is gritty and delves deep into his complicated family life and how the events of his childhood impacted him later on. Thinking about it, it reminds me that one of the most engaging traits of a memoir-style graphic novel is how personally and deeply it can vibe with you. Something about the way that these people choose to visually portray these memories as well as how they tell them adds another layer of meaning to the entire experience. The way that many artists draw often ties in directly with their life experiences and the kind of person they are, even in the most subtle ways-- and when you add that to the fact that this person is using drawing to tell their personal stories, it's no wonder why these comic memoirs become so popular.