Palestine: thoughts

I like how in Palestine, regardless of the panel set-up, the text seems to spill haphazardly across each page, tumbling over snapshots of daily life, yet the order of things is never hard to discern, the flow never interrupted. The effect makes for a fast read, even though the subject matter is about as far from Blankets fluff as one could hope to get.

Sacco seems harsh at times, but it's easy to see why he gets angry when he does. I think I'm too nice not to be completely broke and stranded down there within three days.

back in action

So, after a ridiculous gap in postings, I return to say "I'm alive".

Berlin was a great book. The smooth, subtle transitions between characters helped the thing to flow like the Rhine after a storm.

The only thing that really confused me was the similar look of every single character. I feel like a lot of side character threads get completely lost in this because everyone looks exactly the same. I'm unsure, for instance, if the frozen beggar the police found on p.162 was the man who went to war with Marthe's brother or not. I speculating that he is, though none of the rest of my Monday group seemed to have noticed that. Maybe I'm just going crazy, skewed by the clever little connections in Watchmen, linking any character with a thin resemblance to any other character ever to appear. Hey, wasn't that guy on the street corner once before? I swear to god, he's SO familiar! It's like I KNOW him!

With that, I'm going to go print my rough essay draft.

essays in chalk

I’m still doubting my own decisions as to the final paper, but as usual, I’ve taken the weird, though decidedly ethnographic path. I’m trying to find the graphic narrative on a campus level, in unexpected places. So far, this has led me to the quad, where chalking is governed by more of the aspects featured in McCloud’s book than one would at first imagine. I spent close to a half hour yesterday trying to capture some of the best examples before the rain really moved in and hopefully got a good start. The most intriguing things to me are the circle of concrete on one of the bridges over the Boneyard and the long stretch of panels/concrete segments leading to transit plaza from the north side of the English building. The former had been turned into a mini-earth with a dove over it, the latter touted the merits of an informatics minor vertically across four panels.

Having talked to a few people about it, the whole process appears more complex and strategic than I’d thought, and the advertising aspect less of a centralized theme. One of my friends drew a giant dragon in front of Foellinger while advertising for Tai Kwan Do, another lamented the “longer patches” being taken up by time she got to the quad to chalk for a NOW event. And everyone, no matter what they’re chalking for, seems to end their adventure with chalk outlines of someone’s body. My freshman year, after chalking for a car wash, my friends and I did chalk outlines with Clue guesses scrawled across them (i.e. – Professor Plum, with the wrench, in the Billiard Room).

Chalking isn’t always advertising, either, which, for my part in this, is a very good thing. Sometimes poetry is scrawled over everything, circa the Montage fall submission call chalking adventure last semester. Other times, the message is one of encouragement or ridiculousness (last semester my friends chalked the sidewalks around Busey for another friend who’d been have a difficult week full of exams and drama).

I’m hoping this dive into the chalk realm works out, and that if all else fails, I can think of a few more aspects of campus culture to tear apart, McCloud style.

Fun Home Reflections

I really liked Fun Home, but I have to say, the last chapter of the book probably would’ve meant a whole lot more to me had I ever read Ulysses. It’s practically an omnipresent theme right up to the end.

The conversation in the car on the way to Coal Miner’s Daughter says so much through subtle shifts in facial expression and arm position. The uniform, blocky frames barely change, especially where Alison’s father is concerned. It’s a strange way of conveying motion, but I can’t think of a better way, offhand, of depict a conversation taking place entirely in a car on the way to somewhere.

I also identified with Alison’s animosity toward literary criticism. I spent my first semester hating the way people over analyzed every word of stuff like The Dubliners, all of Hemingway’s short stories and pretty much every sonnet ever written. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" was probably the first piece I ever got into on that level, and even then I resented nit-pickiness. It seemed straightforward enough to me and I was not willing to argue over supposed Christ-like references on that stupid urn. As with many other aspects of my life, but here much more appropriately, I blame the new critics, those bigoted elitist sexist ass clowns, for tarnishing the face of criticism as a whole and creating this stuffy world of hidden symbolism and innovative bullshitting so pervasive in the literary world even today as post-structuralism has apparently taken the reigns. Wow, that was a bit of a rant. How horrid!

Malled/Malltopia/It's a Mall World After All

So work on the mini-comic is progressing smoothly. Malls are intriguing little worlds to study, if you think about it. Whole social hierarchies exist within the confines of those massive shoppingplexes. And everyone goes there – the early morning mall walkers, the teenage girls, the moms with twelve million children in tow, the couples. You could spend the whole day there, dining on greasy food court fair, relaxing by the obligatory wishing fountain, and still not experience everything a mall has to offer. Just ask the customer service guys. They should know. Really, they should – it’s sort of their job.

Random thoughts:

• The mall cops have less authority than the campus police and the ones at Marketplace mall look like Canadian Mounties stripped of their horses and dignity.
• I miss Natural Wonders. Anyone else know what I’m talking about? I was so sad to see that store go!
• Orange Julius and Auntie Anne’s Pretzels make up the two essential stops along the outer ring of any respectable food court. Also, I have the recipe for both signatures items. Damn, I need to have a mall party…the next time I feel like spending three hours on those pretzels.
• Parodying well-known stores is fun. But sometimes, the real names are even better: Perfumania, Deck the Walls, Alpaca Connection, Relax-a-daisical, Gizmo Pods, Jean Madeline Salon/Aveda Environmental Lifestyle, Hat Shark, Paradise Pen, etc. I mean, come on, those last two sound like someone just threw a couple of words together randomly on a sign and started hocking their wares – like a garage sale of unused things. And Gizmo Pods has got to be the best kiosk ever, just based on that name.
• The mall I grew up with: St.Claire Square

back from break

So I made through roughly a chapter of Stuck Rubber Baby over spring break (chapter 15 to be exact, with a total of seven people streaming by asking random questions to people in my room or getting ready to go sleep). Finishing it in the quiet of my own room was weird last night, but I did it and I harbor the sleep deprived glossy stare to prove it.
I loved the book. The only part that caught me by surprise, though, was the ending with Orley. I may or may not have cried a bit. The rest of the stuff had such thick foreshadowing prior to every event that I spent more time desperately wanting to be wrong than being blindsided by accidents, deaths, and the pregnancy (spoiler alert?).
The ridiculous chipmunk faces still bother me, though I've gotten surprisingly used to them and that worries me.

Also, aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh minicomic!

southward bound

Throughout the novel I keep hoping something will develop between Toland and Sammy. I’m seriously crossing my fingers. On the flipside, I’m constantly worried for all the characters. It’s becoming a real page turner, and I’m actually saying that seriously.

I’m headed down south this next week (really south, not just Southern Illinois) with this rich, sordid background once again. I’ve found in roaming around Mississippi before that it’s mostly the older white people of the community that get kind of tense and defensive about everything. It’s generally obvious when you strike up a conversation with someone whether or not it’s safe to travel down that road.

This time I’m headed to New Orleans, where the past is even more complicated to begin with and has been made infinitely more messy by the can of worms Katrina opened up. I’m not sure what that’ll actually mean for my trip at all, but I find it ironic that this adventure falls right in the midst of this particular book.

stuck rubber baby

Fifty-five pages in, I still don’t quite understand the title, but I like the book. The whole world seems slightly caricaturized in both the artwork and development of any non-major character, though not quite. I like the character of the crazy town cop and the approach everyone has to him. It seems to be a kind of laid-back small town thing to keep people like that in power, even when they’re an embarrassment to your town. The way he’s used to draw in media attention is fantastic. In the tiny town where my dad teaches/is semi-retired from teaching in, there’s a guy on the school board named Cricket (I went a whole year thinking that was a nickname, but it’s not), who got there purely because his dad’s some city official and who seems only to formulate terrible ideas. He reminds me of Chopper. He got some local press during the teacher strike a few years back, though gaining local press never means much. Prize chickens garner local press coverage on slow days. I have actually heard groups of teachers talking about what “that ‘ole Cricket’s up to now” on crowded back porches over venison hors d’oeuvres. What he’s actually up to at this point is anyone’s guess. I think he might’ve gotten arrested for something inane, but don’t quote me on that.

nutty

As a kid, I was always curious about the peanut brittle man, but sort of scared. I never worked up the courage to offer much more than a quiet “hello”. Certain groups of older Centralians bought from him sometimes, exchanging money over that old bike of his like it was some sort of illicit drug deal. At other times they’d just stop to chat, offering excuses for why they couldn’t purchase any more at the moment.

He showed up at Priced Right, National, IGA, Dobb’s Bargain City, the dollar store strip mall, K-Mart, Big Lots, Woolworth’s, making his rounds more efficiently and comprehensively than even the Salvation Army bell ringers. One by one the stores changed hands or simply folded to the competition (Wal-Mart), but the peanut brittle man hung around.

Signs began to crop up in the late nineties outside some of the stingier businesses: “No Soliciting – except the peanut brittle man”.

I don’t even know his name or how to go about obtaining that information. I googled him, but to no avail. And obviously some of the businesses don’t know either. It’s gotten to the point where when you open up your own store in Centralia, you’re automatically playing host to the peanut brittle man as well. Same red bike every time, same basket, same labels over plastic baggies of sugary peanut bliss telling the would-be consumer that all proceeds go to benefit some church I otherwise would never have heard of. For all I know, he’s the only member. It’s not a big town.

And that’s the story on that. The local paper did an article on him awhile back. I suppose if I really dug around back home I could find out more.

As far as the reading goes, I’m not finished with the last portrait (Milgaard) yet, but I’m getting there. In regard to the Easy E one, though, 1960’s mental institutions are totally cool in a creepy, haunting way. And for the record, the movie version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest does not even compare to the book. Just saying.

portraits

Portraits from Life is much more touching and thought provoking than I thought it would be.
I love how the characters portrayed are kooky pioneers and real, honest, rough-hewn people. None of them are perfect or even necessarily charming and pleasant to be around.
History forgets the oddballs just as soon as they fade from front page recognition – if they ever make it there at all.

So, in the spirit of Collier’s book, here are a few more interesting little-known people:

Byron LeRoy Godbersen transformed an entire town in Iowa into a medieval wonderland.

Tom Mix, a superstar in the world of early western movies, was killed by a suitcase in the Arizona desert (near a town called Florence which still has a plaque marking the spot where the accident occurred).

Maybe by Wednesday I'll have more of them or something more profound of my own to say. We'll see.

two random thoughts on V for Vendetta

I love the clever wittiness of the “vicious cabaret” song which begins book two, how it recaps what’s happened thus and shows us where most of the surviving main characters are at this point. I kind of felt like I should’ve been singing, but my roommates already think I’m crazy and I don’t think enigmatic tunes of anarchy would help.

The state of women within the fascist society of V for Vendetta seems to have degenerated significantly. We see this almost from the beginning with Evey trying to turn to prostitution to get her out of the matchbox factory and then again with Almond’s widow, who initially allows him to shove her around because she needs his support. After he’s gone, so is the safety net. In the song and her later monologue, we see she’s suddenly on her own and desperate. We also get a sense of the domestic isolation of a pre-60’s housewife.
Also, Roger Dascombe is a sleaze.

Remember Remember...

I remember the fifth of November. Nothing extraordinary happened, which is fine by me. I took pictures of me wearing a Guy Fawkes mask I found on clearance the week before at Halloween USA (a giant warehouse place which was as amazing as it sounds) and chose one as my profile picture on Facebook. And that was pretty much the extent of things. I think I had a midterm or something…

If you’ve got an inordinate amount of time to waste, the BBC has a slow loading trivia game about the Gunpowder Plot.

I, personally, enjoyed the game for the gravity defying rats that scurry around the whole time. I know no reason why that should ever be forgot.

As far as the book goes thus far, I really like the ‘paint with water’ style color scheme. The pastels lend a kind of surreal feeling to the whole thing. It’s sinister yet calm. Eerie, I guess?

finishing Understanding Comics

First off, for some reason the idiom stage of the six steps discussed in chapter seven confuses me. So... it's like genre, but not quite? I think more than anything, the fact that he calls it the "idiom" stage bothers me. That term does not fit there. Idioms strike me as things like "bull in a china shop" or "killing two birds with one stone". The picture associated with step three made more sense to me, at least - a comic artist can wear many hats. But that's an idiom (in the literary cliché sense), too. Is that supposed to be ironic? Is McCloud just trying to mess with me?

It also amazes me that McCloud doesn't go more in depth with the color in comics branching more into the abstract, picture plane of things. I think, for once, he may've missed an opportunity to throw that triangle in again. I was surprised the chapter was so short.
Still, I was left wondering what kind of impact the expensive nature of color has had or continues to have on the comics world. How many weird and revolutionary things would've been not only tried but exposed to the broader audience by now had starving artists of, say, the sixties and seventies had greater color access (and in a broader range)? It seems like much of this innovation was happening abroad while America was still caught in the superhero time warp. I'm curious to explore that further. It's like a parallel timeline of innovation which this book kind of skims over.

Okay, well, I'm sort of out of time, but I might actually continue this post/line of thinking later on today. Ranting is fun.

Superman!

Is there an equal to Superman in Watchmen? As I finish my wiki page, I'm having a hard time find one totally analogous to the man of steel. This could be due to the ravenous copyright, sure, but I think it's just because he'd be boring. He doesn't have much of an edge. He's never really bad.
Granted, in the beginning he was much more gruff, but back then he didn't really fight general crime so much as social injustice. Way meatier subject matter.
I guess he's somewhat Dr. Manhattan-like, in that he possesses actual powers, but people don't immediately know that. Also, he has a day job and was born with his powers, so that's out.
He's definitely not the comic. There is very little affable Rambo in Superman that I can find. Or maybe it's just that we don't see his dark side. Maybe that's the point. I mean, there's Bizarro and cyborg Superman, but those don't really count. Both of those just set Superman's dark side up as an outside entity, not really a part of him. We don't want to see his inward struggle (unless it concerns his love with Lois). It's so much easier to avert our gaze while he's in the fortress of solitude kicking the walls or whatever, cursing Jimmy Olsen for being too damn nice. And you can't tell me you couldn't imagine that happening. He does disappear quite often, mostly to sulk and bemoan his loneliness, but that doesn't count. I want to see him punch new craters into the moon over his income taxes or something. Something to make him more human in an indefinable way that may just make him less super, but more relatable to the world we actually live in today.

The idea that the battle between good and evil is not so clear cut, that somewhere in the murky middle ground lie corrupt superheroes and retired super villains just trying to get by is awesome to me. So far this novel seems to shatter and re-examine the world of superheroes the way Into the Woods (the play at least – was it ever a book?) flips fairy tales upside-down. And what are superhero comics but modern day, big city fairy tales where the princess is now a wisecracking reporter and the prince needs more than just a trusty steed and a bit of magic to fend off strange villains with atomic powers.

Blankets: chapters 8&9 (leaving Michigan behind)

I like the quiet form, the various aspect-to-aspect transitions in Craig’s drive back to the restaurant after visiting Raina. As sappy, terrible, and journal-like as it may sound, I feel connected to that journey after returning from my Michigan trip last weekend, although that had nothing to do with significant others or any single person really. It’s so much more bleak and monotonous traveling back south, too. The snow recedes from the fields successively until, finally, the roads are bordered only by mud and soggy, flattened prairie grass (pages 504-506 capture this feeling so well, in the change of seasons rather than in the journey south, but still). It actually feels very much like falling off the edge of the earth, as Thompson depicts it. The closer I got to home the more the magic the weekend held dissipated, the more the real world crept back up behind me. At least I got to keep the people closer, though, so there’s that. Craig was missing out on that one.

Anyway, just as Craig and Raina realize the impossibility of running away together, of living indefinitely in their impossible dream, I suppose I had to at some point acknowledge the fact that I could not spend the rest of my days lounging atop a frozen wave one hundred yards out into Lake Michigan. The ephemeral nature of the whole ordeal, the surreal feeling of climbing ten foot mounds of ice. I could cling to the idea of them the way Craig clings to Raina for awhile, but that would only prolong my general disconnect from the rest of the world. It’s actually kind of exciting, though, to move on and feel so changed.

Blankets, ch.6 & 7

I love how we are led into chapter six, how unexpectedly the feeling of dirtiness, of sin and shame shifts from young, peed-upon Craig to teen Craig at the party. The framing on the party page especially encapsulates that feeling of loneliness and uneasiness in the midst chaos. It's every bad high school party ever rolled into one. It's also every event I've ever attended at the notorious big white apartment building by the Huck's gas station back in my home town. In much the same scenario, every time I visit people I haven't seen since forever and want desperately just to hang out and reconnect with, we wind up at that horrible apartment complex. I even worry about parking my parents' old van anywhere near the place. God only knows what could happen to it. Also, how can so many skeezy guys live in one building and why do my friends know ALL of them??
Anyway, in that sense, Thompson does a great job of making me feel tied to the story, a little empty and hurting for teen Craig.

Random thoughts:

I also love how, on the top left of p.345, Craig's thought bubble connects with Raina, as if through the poems he is able to get inside her mind in a way.

On p.346, Craig says "I love you" in beautiful script, but Raina replies "Oh Craig" in typed letters, robbed of their authenticity like her transcribed poems, in a sense. It's the first time we see such apprehension in her and it's so subtle. Or do the typed capital letters mean something else altogether which I failed to pick up on?

The magic's leaving somehow by chapter six, yet in all the crowds, rarely are Craig and Raina actually separated.

In chapter seven, memories of happier times when Craig's world centered around Raina lack frames, giving them a sort of intimacy, a warmth in the way everyone is clumped together. Craig's view of the outside world as he nears the end of his time with Raina, however, is not only framed, but doubly framed as in the second image we are looking into a room and through a window. Is that melodramatic overkill? The window to the outside world?

And just as a point of comparison, here's actual Michigan in the winter, on the beach by the lake (I spent the weekend there.):

Blankets Ch.2-5

This time I'm not just going to rant and try desperately to align the story to my real life like it's some terrible romance novel that clings to vague universal experiences in an unnerving and perplexing way. I think this is better than that.

The whole winter church camp ordeal seems crucial to the beginning of today's reading. My favorite part of it, strangely enough, are the parallel scenes of young Craig and his teenage equivalent finding respite in the game room. The loud, frenetic noises of the camp first give way to the hum and whir of the heating unit, accentuated by its transcendence of the panels on p.87. This "hummmmm" also surrounds young Craig, implying some sense of relief and comfort. As with the later scene, though, this doesn't lull him to sleep, rather it allows him to think more deeply and clearly, to be somehow more present in his surroundings.
On p.118, as we revisit the area, aggressive foosball noises and pool playing and have replaced the banging, whirring machine noises of Craig's first foray into the game room. When Raina disappears, we get the same lost, frightened look on his face as seen earlier when the heater started up. This time, however, it is Raina's soft breathing as she sleeps beneath the hoop shoot game that drowns out a world of inane noise (the rest of the room fades into sketchiness). This serves first and foremost to highlight just how enamored Craig is with Raina in the most subtle way. Once the last guy has left and Craig is touching Raina's hair the furnace whir finally returns and with it the same sense of peace, rounding out the chapter on a high note.

Some other observations:
1) Is vacation girl on p.136 the daughter of that teacher? That would be so rural Sunday school. Her hoity-toity, carefree assurance combined with the resemblance of the two gave me that impression, though it's never stated and pretty much completely irrelevant.

2) I also enjoyed what looks to be one of those radical, hip teen Bibles on the table called Way.

3) On p.154 it took me awhile to understand that the snowplow was in fact covering up the mailbox, which probably explains the lapse in correspondence. I hate how snowplows indiscriminately bury mailboxes, parked cars, sidewalks, and basically anything else near the road, not to mention how disgusting they make the snow. That little detail stood out to me as so small and sad. Those three frames encapsulate the isolation of a Midwestern winter quietly and perfectly to me.

4) In her childlike fascination with the snow on p.179, Raina looks a bit like Laura which is kind of sweet.

5) From the first time we see him, Ben appears as an amazingly complex character. There's so much going on with him throughout the story. He openly feels the pain of the divorce and of Raina's coming of age experiences (which leave him behind) way more than the other characters allow themselves to. He's such an unlikely and intriguing foil.

6) P.219, the bottom panels, are hilarious.

7) What's with the creepy stuffed animals on p.223 (especially the clown)?

Blankets ch.1 & VBS

First off, I sort of read all of Blankets in one setting, but I'll try to go chapter by chapter with this thing.

The setting of Blankets in general feels like my hometown, only my immediate family is ridiculously liberal, so I grew up completely on the periphery of the whole pious rural lifestyle.

The Sunday school teacher, the blindly attentive class, the hellfire and brimstone, all remind of one scary and bewildering day spent in a Baptist vacation bible school program as a kid. I tagged along with my cousin, whom I was visiting and following everywhere (I was maybe seven). I don't understand how parents allow things like that to be heaped upon their children in such a setting. It's like reading Steven King novels to them as bedtime stories. The activities were bizarre to me to, like in depth bible study that involved matching scriptures on a chalkboard. I guess the word "vacation" misled me. I was very much expecting to have fun. I gave up an entire day running through my grandparents' apple orchard for that, and I very much doubt my soul received any kind of redemption or anything out of the whole ordeal. Snack time, however, was decent.