Week 14 - The Future of Comics

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 understand that the story is in someway a revenge/payback story, but it was all too weird for me to handle.

Out of Skin has a more traditional art approach as compared to Trash Mountain. It utilizes more earthy tones, a minimal color palette (black, white, and red), and a watercolor feel to tell its story. The formatting is also exceptional, as the author takes full advantage of the page and comes up with creative ways to lead your eyes down/keep scrolling. The comic has a very disturbing a claustrophobic feel to it due to all of the intense close-ups and unsettling moments. The story is narrated as if it were the inner thoughts of our protagonist, an old woman, as she increasingly loses her mind. While it was a tad hard to follow, the story has a lot of unanswered questions and really makes you think (as a lot of great horrors usually do).

It's very interesting to see how people nowadays are creating comics in a much different, and unique, way than the traditional paperback book. A lot of the artists have a lot more freedom/ways of telling their stories through a digital medium as opposed to an old-fashioned one. I might have to go back to that list and take a look at a few more, because from what I've read so far, the possibilities are endless.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 7 - Maus

The Holocaust is never an easy subject to depict in any form of media (books, films, comics, etc). It's always bound to make people uncomfortable with its gruesome imagery and terrifying stories. Of all the Holocaust stories and films I've witnessed, I read one this week that definitely ranks among the top based around the subject. Art Spiegelman's 1980 graphic novel Maus is undoubtedly a masterpiece. A deeply personal and powerful tale of survival and the hardships of family. It tells the story of Spiegelman's father, Vladek, and his experience in/surviving the Holocaust. The story is told in interview format, including Vladek's question responses/story at the bottom of almost every panel. The narrative also goes back and forth between Vladek's past and the present day when Art is interviewing him. This was a great way to pause Vladek's experience in Auschwitz before getting too intense and for the audience to learn more about Art and Vladek's strain
Read more

Week 15 - Stereotypes and Representation REDUX

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
Read more