Comics
Okay, I will admit it. When the semester first started I was one of those people who believed that comics were not a serious form of literature. "Comics were those bright, colorful magazines filled with bad art, stupid stories and guys in tights"; this is a statement Scott McCloud made in his Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art novel, and it summed up my opinion on comics perfectly. The one thing I learned throughout the course of the semester is that comics are more than my above position. Some comics do fit into that particular category, but you can say the same thing about our more standard concept of novels (a good example of this would be romance novels). The truth behind Graphic Novels comes out to that they can take on serious topics and be very effective with the message they are relating to the reader. The difference is in the way the message is delivered, and the best way to describe this delivery system is as a deconstruction of the novel form. It is this theme of deconstruction I want explore, and I plan to do this by showing how comics can deconstruct historical events, their own genre, and even social issues. Before I go any further I would like to give some definitions on wh
By doing this Spiegelman can get his audience to understand what happened during this event and realize why we need to look at the event as opposed to turning our eyes and minds away for protection. Ellis's sarcastic wit and paranoid beliefs are the perfect medium to show his view of a twisted and disturbing future for human kind. First Deconstruction, "a method of literary analyses originated in France in the mid-20th century and based on a theory that, by the very nature of language and usage, no text can have a fixed, coherent meaning" (Webster's Dictionary 358). My view on this is he was showing how we tend to force people who are different into small, poor areas where we can hold them down and oppress them with relative ease, much like we do with newly arrived immigrants and African Americans. Suffice it to say that the two most interesting characters are the ones most people consider to be criminals (the Comedian and Rorschach), while the one who is considered to be the most respectable (Veidt) is the person who kills the most people in the world (all for his own ego); so draw your own conclusions. From the outset we see the different races presented in the form of different animals; Jewish people are transformed into mice, while the German's are portrayed as cats. During the trial in which he lost his licensee to practice law we saw Daredevil brutally attacking people associated with the crime ring not because they had committed a crime, but because he wanted information on who had framed him. By turning them into people changing themselves into aliens, he was able to show how we treat people how we believe to be different today. All of this is a stark difference to the actions of Batman who is on the edge of crossing over from a crime fighter to a criminal. of a group of characters" (Webster's 929). The best example I can show of this is Art Spiegelman's Maus, a Graphic Novel that deals with the holocaust of WWII. Another Graphic Novel that you can put into this category is Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, a novel about the take over of Iran by the current fundamentalist Islamic regime. Miller must like this depictions of his heroes, because he did something similar with his remake of the Daredevil character. As I stated at the beginning I was one of those people who believed that comics were for children. Three of the Graphic Novels we read during the semester dealt with this topic: Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Daredevil: Born Again along with Alan Moore's Watchmen.
Common topics in this essay:
Graphic Novel,
Watchmen Batman,
Graphic Novels,
African Americans,
Invisible Art,
Novel Okay,
Captain America,
Webster's Dictionary,
Comedian Rorschach,
Watchmen Moore,
graphic novel,
graphic novels,
graphic novel deconstruct,
treat people,
novel deconstruct,
social issues,
historical events,
deconstruct historical,
people changing,
learned throughout,
deconstruct historical events,
people believed comics,
happening world,
|
Acceptance Essays
