Benevolence and Dictation

So if the French are amazing at satire and the Canandians are fairly polite people, does that mean that Guy Delisle does polite satire? 

After reading Pyongyang, I'd have to say yes. The entire story is a trippy cheek-biting exploration of a culture so far removed from the western experience as to be nearly incomprehensible. 

While the story wasn't as intense a read as Black Hole, I still found it worth it. The Author's commune with the trapped Sea Turtles was an especially poignant image, especially when juxtaposed at how frenetic the rest of the story felt. At every turn, the author was being moved from place to place and with every move there were eyes watching. IN the dark of the lobby, there was a stillness that was absent in the rest of the book. 

The section that described the visit to the Friendship museum was clever as well, especially the cheek biting at the absurdity of genuflecting to a wax statue. It brought this to mind:

  

I know, it's Anderson Cooper, but there's just something about the giggles. He does it a lot and every time, it catches me too. 

With Pyongyang, I got caught out by the author's sense of the absurd, and I gotta tell you, it's probably only slightly better to be giggling like a madwoman in a library. 

Pfft. At this point, I should just surrender and accept that I'm incapable of not making a goof of myself in public.

Pyongyang is full of sarcasm. It took a while to get through, not that it was difficult or anything just a little boring. I mean we from Black Hole to Fun Home both are rather intense in their own way, to a simple story of a cartoonist in the overly suppress country of North Korea.I think the author used sarcasm as comic relief, because of how suppressed the country is and how suppressed he must of felt this was the only outlet he had. 

 

Not All Fun and Games

This is a very interesting take on a memoir. I find that it really tells the story and allows the reader to "see" and feel the story. 

In many comic books the background is drawn to be realistic, this is to allow readers to step in and become part of the story. Bechdel used this technique and set the background with a shadowing of blue. This blue shadowing only intensified the realistic background for me. It is a seemingly inviting blue like she is asking and inviting the reader in to her childhood home and life; which is exactly what she is doing with this graphic novel.

  

 

At the beginning of the graphic novel is an image of her and her father engaging in a seemingly normal father daughter act of playing and ends with her jumping into a pool with her father. The images set the precedence that while her father was not perfect he was still her father first and foremost.

So, my take on this story is fairly straight forward. I sympathize with the author and her mixed feelings in relation to her interactions with her father. I have a similar sense of "Love you better from half a continent away" with my own mother and I really think that part of the reason that his tragicomic memoir continues to sell well is because most people feel this way about their own parents. Admittedly, my isues are significantly less tangled than Ms. Bechdel's, but so much of the story rings true that it becomes a voyeuristic exploration of another person's experiences. 

The father's emphasis on the importance of 'presenting a perfect family' in spite of the shaky framing of the actual familial relationships is an effective motivation for the evolution of the story. I especially enjoyed the use of subtle coloration in each image. In most of the images, the differences in what was colored and what was not made me think that the things that were left white were those that stood out more clearly in her memory while the images that were blue were those that were still shrouded to a certain extent by the loss of detail that happens in memory. 

In the image above, the father is rendered with no shading as are the alter boys and a few of the other church members. The reflection of memory has washed out some of the details, but the things she is pulling forward out oof her own memory as being significant are the clearest. Even the other church members that aren't a direct part of her realization about her father stand out. For me, this brought the notion home even more clearly. 

I know in my own exploration of my past, I've teased out details by filling in the background with details  that were less important. Like trying to remember what I did on my tenth birthday. I know the party was at a part and the air smelled like clover and our neighbor with the bright fake red hair was there, but those details aren't the central focus of my excavation of my own memory, but byproducts of it. For Ms. Bechdel, the background seems to serve a similar function, left in white because she found them, but certainly not the focus like the image of her father and the alter boys.

Again, the central image in each panel is left uncolored. In the lower two panels, the clothing is colored and makes me think that Ms. Bechdel remembered the 'type' of clothing but not the detail of patterning, choosing to leave that aspect of the memory undiscovered. 

 

 

 

Quazars, Star Fields and Other Astronomical Phenomena

Let's face it, the story is, well, weird. The characters are overwhelming, the art is suffocating and the message is bleak at best. But-- and it's a major point-- the whole thing is brilliantly executed. After you give yourself a while to soak up the strange, it makes a disturbing amount of sense. 

Ostensibly a story about a group of teens who are afflicted with an STD that manifests differently for each sufferer, the narrative evolves and presents the suffering of adolescence in a way that makes you sit up and take notice. 

The dark heavy illustrations are rife with sexual imagery and phallic symbols are rampant (oh god, the puns are nearly impossible to avoid). Sex and life and death and change all swirl together in an overwhelming fog of angst and at the end, the reader emerges from the darkness blinking and shaken by the violence of the experience. Nearly every image can be interpreted as some type of sexual imag, from the disected frog with it's vaginal-esque slit-- complete with dripping fluids-- all the way through to the rock formation at the end-- the bright tunnel not unlike the exit of the birth canal, bright light becoming one into a "new" life. In so many ways, the book feels like an exploration of a Freudian mind where a cigar is never just a cigar.

Within the story, the allusions are so multi-layered that it's possible to stumble (and god, that's totally what re-reading feels like-- stumbling in the dark) new ideas and connections. Graphic matching is all over the place and the lack of numbered pages, in hindsight, is pretty effective in continuing that slightly off balance feeling the entire work evokes.  


Originally published as a series that spanned ten years, the compilation of the entire story into a single volume lacks only a few things, and I feel like the choice to leave out the introductions from the individual issues leave the story bewilderingly open ended. In the sense of maintaining the confusion of the overall story, it makes sense, but I admit to being a little disappointed when I found them after searching around for more information about the series.  
I agree with you, I think we lose a great deal of the story with compilations. After each issues there is editing and with a compilation often times parts are shortened or left out all together.

This TIME article makes some really good points, especially as it touches on the connection between the insanity of adolescence and the slasher phenomena where sex and violence meet in a morass of arousal and confusion and terror for everyone involved. 




I had the strong feeling that in order to understand this comic I must be in a drug induced haze. 
There is just so much going on through out the whole story, there is really no down side or reprieve.
However, Black Hole is by far my favorite comic of the semester! It was a quick read, but admittedly I had to read it twice. I felt like I was missing something. 

The artistic element of this book is rendered wonderfully. Burns' use split images allowing you to see both character's reactions. I thought it was interesting how he wrote the way "the bug" affects each person differently and how it manifests itself. It is a great juxtaposition of the character's personality and there hidden fears. For example, the bug created a mouth on Rob's neck that spoke what I saw as only the truth. And Chris she shed her skin like a snake. This makes me think about all the negative connotations about snakes; they are evil and deceitful. I don't believe that Chris is evil or deceitful, but that she feels that way about herself. 

The most disturbing  and well perplexing part of the book was, what role did Davids killing spree play in the grand scheme of things? I kind of feel like that is how the Bug effected him; but if that is the case then it opens a whole new can of worms.  It is my thinking that Dave was severely disturbed and the bug enabled  his psychoses to fully manifest.  Killing is apart of him, it defines who he is.