Week12

Oh man.

For quite awhile I was sure that Bone was my favorite comic at the age of 16. Then I realized I couldn't play favorites. Jeff Smith is just a downright fantastic cartoonist, he has a wonderful flare for believable dialogue and is exceptionally deft with the brush. Jeff also has an amazing understanding of comic's and cartooning given the fact that he combines character's that seem so different in style: his humans, the bone's, and the monsters showed off his wide understanding of character design. I'm not that familiar with pogo besides the swamp thing comic we've read in class, But I believe Jeff Smith had a strong care for the medium when developing his style from other comics such as pogo. Just like Chris Ware who studied Gasoline Alley

I own the absolute sandman in fact! rereading the stories were incredibly rewarding. And the art really began to pick up good at this point in the series too. Both stories, the collector and hob, are incredibly text heavy, but I believe Neil Gaiman understands exactly how to not distance the text from the artwork. The juxtaposition is very well achieved. Gaiman is a really good comics writer, and he knows exactly how the medium works with and without text. He cares about the culture of the DC universe as well. He always likes to elude to other DC characters within his stories, and manages to put them in a peculiar new light. You can notice Johanna Constantine in the story of Hob, a relative of John Constantine.

Starman was mildly entertaining. I found the art to be interesting but not necessarily in my taste. I don't really feel as if I got the best out of it though, from what I read the art seemed fairly distant from the story. I'm interested more in the development of the characters and the origin of how Knight senior was able to develop the cosmic rod. It was definitely something different though I'm sure. The writers describe the action in such an enticing and profound way. But that's what kind of sets me away from Starman though. I'm more interested in the writing and not so much with the art, because it feels much more like the images are used as a means for an end. That's not to say I don't think the art is bad, I just don't think they work well together. But that's just what i read within the first fourteen pages, I'm definitely still interested to see how it picks up, because I've heard some really good things about it.

The Court was frankly, just really weird. I felt like nothing happened in the plot. We were familiarized with the characters, but there was no twist, no payoff, it just kind of happened. Maybe Gaiman just wanted to write a story that felt like real life? which was interesting given the usually unusual ranges of subject matter comic generally write. But I finished and I just didn't get much from it. The art was exceptional, no doubt. All the scenes and monologuing. and imagery showed a good understanding of the medium. It's just that the plot took me by surprise in a very mundane way. Ha ha.