For this week, I wanted to go back to a graphic novel that I read, and thoroughly enjoyed, in the middle of the year, My Friend Dahmer. I learned a whole lot more about Dahmer and had the chance to see the film for myself. I added a little further commentary on the story/polished it based on further findings. "This week I decided to read My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf, which I actually had no idea was a graphic novel before it became a film just a few years ago. The book tells the story of the author Derf throughout his last few years in high school and his "friendship" with classmate Jeffrey Dahmer, who later went on to become one of America's most notorious serial killers. Personally there's not a whole lot that stands out about the graphic novel visually. The drawings are fun/get pretty exaggerated at times and it's formatted like a normal graphic novel. The drawings are rather flat and evoke the look of a bizarre television cartoon. However, a...
1.) What is your reaction to the text you just read? As a Batman fan, I've sadly never read The Killing Joke before. It was very powerful and pretty disturbing. Each panel is exceptionally well drawn, the compositions are all stellar, and the story is very compelling (despite reading a while back that Alan Moore was very disappointed with this book). The most interesting part of the story was that it centered primarily on the Joker (the antagonist) more so than Batman (the hero). To see a monster character like the Joker be given a very human backstory (and very sad) was intriguing, given that the character's past was almost always a mystery. 2.) What connections did you make with the story that you read? Discuss the elements of the work with which you were able to connect. I was able to connect this story with Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight films and Tim Burton's 90's Batman movie. In Tim Burton's film, the Joker seemed to be the center of attention a...
For this week, to see just how comics have developed today, I decided to check out the webcomics Out of Skin by Emily Carroll and Trash Mountain by Kelton Sears. I'm not usually one to read webcomics but some of them, like the ones I picked, have a very clever way of telling their stories. When scrolling down, some of them are very creative with their transitions and formatting. Trash Mountain , even though the drawings admittedly are god-awful, has a pretty unique style going for it. Almost every panel in the webcomic is a GIF and combines MS-paint quality character drawings with looped realistic backgrounds/video footage. It almost feels as if Sears is drawing on a movie. He also uses collage techniques, taking realistic photographs and adding them as textures to objects and environments in the story. However, before i knew it, the comic was getting way more bizarre the more I started to scroll down. If I'm being completely honest, i had no idea what was going on. I u...
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