Crumb and the Underground

I read some of the Mr. Natural comics, and they were actually pretty funny. It has the sort of humor that can be in newspapers about...half the time. Then on the other-hand, you have crudely draw demon woman who shows off her panties a little too much or the not-so-subtle sexual innuendoes. Then there's the language, but if you're as well acquainted with censorship as I am, you know it's just as easy to change the language around. What I feel the question here is, if this strip/book was converted into something more 'general audience' oriented, would it still have the same spirit? Certainly not. Also, Crumb might have wanted to make a comic at the time that wasn't restricted to being family friendly. Maybe he was tired of that crap and he wanted to make something that reflected more of him with little personal censorship. At the time, he managed to get away with it because of the underground comic movement. I looked over the Heroes of Blues, which was a very nice change of color both literally and figuratively. It was actually pleasant to see these pictures while reading non-biased info about these prominent figures; all of which might have been ridiculed through style or through how they might act in comics and graphic narratives back in the day. I was curious about why these were on the resource page under 'Underground Comix'. I know these illustrations were done by Crumb, but these are kind of like collectable cards. There's no real story that connects all the people on the individual cards, aside from sharing the same love and appreciation for Blues.

I read Girl Fight Comics...

It was pretty awesome. I can tell this is a comic for guys to spend some alone time with. And some girls. *shrug* I don't discriminate.

But it was still fun to read. The women here are conveyed with power, but it just seems to be lent to them for the sole purpose of being incredibly attractive to men. These women are badass. Though they've only killed colored men in this comic from what I've seen, they're always doing hardcore things while slipping in some gratuitous sexy moment in every short story. In the first one, for instance, Fox becomes the sexy wild woman of the jungle, but not before kicking ass and having sex with another woman. In SHE, the Amazon warriors that are being sought are all women, and of course they have this attraction to men and their habits and doing things that'll please a guy. Lots of boob-shots. The one before the last one was both strange and amusing. Space women traveling via giant penis end up on a planet where they've broken the law by exhibiting 'penis envy'. Yeeaaah.

On the other end of the spectrum, I read Gay Comix.

Which was actually very serious about its own content. I had a feeling it would be if the page that introduced the comic's themes actually admit that the staff that wrote these was gay as well. At first I thought it was a joke or something, but when I actually started reading the stories I was pleased to see that the subject was being taken seriously. I'm glad these were able to get around at all. It's a way of letting other people know, people who might have questions about their own sexuality, how people who are homosexual might live their lives. And there's an assortment of scenarios in this comic. Not all of them are there, but some. Ones that can matter just as much. And it does get funny, but never in a way that insults itself. I just found them to be really interesting. It was in complete contrast to the Girl Fight Comics.

'Contract with God' and 'Blankets'

The 'Contract with God novel was pretty dark. I read the first few pages of Will Eisner's other graphic novels and they all seem to share that in common. They almost feel like cautionary tales; you know. If you do something stupid/rash/naive you're bound to take it in the ass butt {/literally in some cases}. I had to make sure this guy wasn't an anti-semitic because he sure likes to use Jewish characters. I learned through the great Wikipedia that he was a son of Jewish immigrants and alive during the time Contract with God takes place. So these stories can very well be true events, though we will never know for sure and would have to go by Eisner's promise alone. These stories all seem to share the same dark undertone and they always end on a sour or sombre note. It's as if in the end sin and debauchery ends up prevailing, religion is treated like an accessory, and those with kind and frail hearts are never safe from the cruel and unforgiving world. It felt a lot like this novel was made by a man who has struggled with his own faith at the time.

The style was decent; I didn't have any issues with it. It didn't seem as if Eisner was constantly pulling off the stereotypical Jew for every single character he drew up, though sometimes that did come into question. The stories were interesting and quite intense. If they happened, it's an awful shame, but if they didn't exactly happen the way they were told, then perhaps there was more to the story than meets the eye. But I can feel this struggle from the author himself. In a way, he's trying to shed light on the fact that bad things can and do happen to good people, no matter what they might have faith in. Whether or not that is fueled by his own religious doubts or by his own beliefs in the way things truly are is up to the readers. He could very well be an atheist; I don't know. I didn't read into the Wiki on him too much--just enough to see where he came from and when. I'd rather try and focus on the comic rather than the man behind it at the moment, because in the end the message comes from the story, not the man. And the messages I got were pretty clear enough. The world back then, maybe even now, is a harsh and unfair world. Both the wealthy and the poor suffer through similar indignities and troubles, or at least to those equivalent.

I'll have to admit that I read Blankets a couple of times before this year, so I just sort of skimmed through it this time around as a refresher. It's autobiographical, centered around Craig, the author and artist. I was drawn to his art style originally, which was why I picked up the story before it was an assignment. One part I found unforgettable was the pee fight Craig has with his brother one night--it's the kind of thing you don't just make up unless it really happened to you, and that's why I found it both funny and worthy of being included in Craig's flashbacks. The story itself doesn't have much of a plot, but then again, that's just real life for you. Yet it doesn't get boring. One after another, something is going on that keeps you from losing interest even though you're basically following someone through their life. Of course, it's not every little detail, or else the book would be several volumes long. But we get the meat and potatoes of it all, focusing on the themes of religion, abuse, and love. I like the contrast between the current and the past, as well as the drawings/imagination sequences and reality.

Plastic Man!

Oh wow. So I guess this was the prototypical Mr. Fantastic. Plastic Man, an ex-gangster/criminal was drenched in some strange acid that gave him superpowers and he was saved by an order of monks and ends up working for the police department.

I really, really hate super-powered superhero comics with those sorts of origins. I really do. Having been raised on a ton of sci-fi genre materials, every strange/new advancement has some sort of ground--some sort of explanation or origin that would make its capabilities easier to believe. I CAN'T believe that chemicals dropping on some dude will give them superpowers if they can't tell you where they came from. In the real world, if some strong acid drops on you, you'll burn. You'll burn right up. If it isn't strong, good for you; it'll roll off of you like water off a ducks back and maybe cause some irritation later--no biggie. The skin organ is most valuable for its ability to protect the other organs and whatnot from contaminants.

But even putting THAT aside, if I don't know the origins of the character or what he was like before he got his powers or how he changed so dramatically and what the hell monks were doing there when he 'dropped acid' and what his 'unhappy childhood' consisted of, I just don't care. So I tried to suspend my disbelief long enough to understand the world of this comic and the story that runs along with it.

The ones that truly stuck out to me probably stuck out to just about everyone else. The first story, with a child named 'Bright Eyes', was so chock full of child abuse that I had to laugh at the absurdity of it. I don't even think back when this comic was made in the forties that adults would do this sort of thing to a kid. First we see what looks like an infant getting his head dunked in a punch bowl by some guy who can't be younger than his mid-twenties with some sort of huge grudge against him. GET OVER YOURSELF MAN. But this kid isn't two, as his height and proportions suggested. He's probably 6-10 or something. And he has hypnotic blue eyes. Words cannot describe the cheese encrusted in this comic. All it needs are those crappy heroic dialogue one-liners that old Batman was famous for. Oh wait. It has those too. Well, the same kid gets smacked around, threatened with getting his arm broken, and ends up nearly drowning in the sea trying to lead the heroes to the other children. The other children are being sold and kept in self-flooding cages that activate whenever a prospective buyer is about to leave without purchasing a child {or when Sphinx doesn't get heard from in a while}. Then we later learn that Sphinx is Bright Eyes's dad. This strip has shock value written all over it. This strip practically thrives on its attempts to create the most drastic, wretched crime for our hero to solve. But I was far more interested in the absurdity of it all than the hero himself. Plastic Man was still just...fairly generic to me.

The next story I ought to mention is the one with the Super So-an-So. That one just felt like a giant joke, which isn't a bad thing really. I found it more interesting than anything else I read. The hero reminded me of Dopey from the old Loony Tunes cartoons, or that burger guy from Popeye. He's like a stereotypical superhero without the stereotypical personality. He's so vague about his abilities that it's like Cole is making fun of the genre. Even the crime he stopped was a big joke. The killer was trying to take his own mother's life and his mother supports him so much that she even tries to help him kill her in peace. In a house, in a room, in a safe. And it was most humorous.

Finally, there's Wun Cloo, which I tried to read and...well. I read it. I'm sure even a child would be able to make out the racial insensitivity here, but I tried not to let it get to my head. This was the forties. But while reading it I wondered if this was a joke too. The criminal couldn't even be taken seriously. So I put aside my qualms against the whole racism gag and read it as if everyone were of the same origins. It was suddenly an all too typical comic strip again. Wun Cloo was like a toon to me, as everyone/thing else was to me. But that doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of racial stereotypes evoked by these strips. I didn't let it get to me. Like I've said before, it was a different time.

Little Nemo and Boondocks

Yup. That's what I read. I'm still looking over the Annie review by Harold Gray, which is pretty interesting so far. I still can't help but find those large, pupil-less eyes to be extremely unsettling, despite the nature of the comic itself. I read a few strips of Little Orphan Annie in middle school, but I was never drawn to the artistic style. When I used to pick up a newspaper to look at the comics, I looked for the ones that often made me laugh, had something informative about them, or had a decent style. I never got into American comics that much though. The strips always looked to be lazily rendered to me and superhero comics were a little too intense for my liking. I used to read stuff like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and all kinds of manga because I found both the story behind things as well as the style they're rendered in to be of utmost importance. The short strips were good for the times I needed a laugh or two, but the longer, book-length comics were more appealing to me.

I read a few strips of Little Nemo, including the Palace of Ice. The stories are very dreamlike, though his fantasies seem pretty highly developed for a growing boy like himself. When I was a kid all my dreams were horrifically surreal and full of monsters. His are actually pretty pleasant, but they're pretty heavy in dialogue. It's easier to get into the narrative of Slumberland even if you know it's just a place in Nemo's dreams. The comics all end alike, with Nemo waking up to something or another. It's the most interesting panel to me because it acts as a kicker; the details that preceeded the end often have to do with how he's woken up. For instance, in the Palace of Ice, the subject everyone started to focus on was the cold. In the last panel of that page, he wakes up having kicked off most of his covers. In another short strip, he ends up falling through space, only to wake up on the floor after having fallen out of bed. It's neat for a comic, with some linear narrative going on. I haven't had a chance to read a solid series of comics from Little Nemo to be able to tell if there's some ongoing story in Slumberland that is continued every time Nemo sleeps. If so, it'd be a really interesting comic. People would want to keep reading to find out what's going on in Slumberland, even when they realize that it's just a dream.

Boondocks, or at least the comic recommended on the resources page, was a little painful to look at. I used to read these comic strips in the newspaper on Sundays, and the style was way different--more refined. Then, a couple of years or so later, I watched the show on Adult Swim. I don't know if they're still releasing new episodes, but I was watching it up until last year. It's a hilarious show, so I gave the comic we were assigned a chance even if the cover illustration alone put me off. I was curious to know what the diamond in the rough was like, since it was the origin of a strip I'd read as a child and the series I've watched as a teenager. It was pretty much the same as what I've come to love and remember. Huey is practically a genius, though cursed as he is to be a child. No one takes him seriously, even when he makes perfect sense and talks like an adult. His brother Riley is pretty much part of the stereotype that Huey fights against, but they get along well enough. Huey's neighbor Jazmine is part African American, but she's naive as her age would suggest. Huey's grandfather is often a subject as well, as is Jazmine's dad. The neighborhood itself is often a subject in these comics. But there's a lot being dealt with racial stereotypes in this comic, and I don't see how others can find it offensive either. I read it as a jab towards both sides--those who do and don't support these stereotypes. The message seems to read that whether you are or aren't against them, they're still there to an extent. Huey ends up just having to deal with it because he's just a kid and no one really listens to him. Regardless, I still found the comics from 'Right to be Hostile' to be amusing, even if the art style was pretty awkward.