Week13

Vertigo, First offenses was really fun. I love a lot of vertigo titles and this book was a good way to familiarize myself with the ones that vertigo find to be the most significant. I was already familiar with Lucifer, Fables, and Preacher. All really fantastic genre beakers. Vertigo I find interesting because they can take any genre out of fantastical fiction and twist it in a new way you wouldn't expect. So many of these stories are based on a protagonist with unimaginable power, and yet most of them are all about them trying to find their place in the world. I find it interesting how none of them choose to create a new world and instead blend in with the powers at be.

Corto Maltese had a wonderful style, the gestures and the characterization are really eye-catching. The comic had a ton of line work in it, and used a very sparse amount of black spotting. In terms of viewing scenes with characters and scenery, it gave the work a look that appeared architectural. The writing was really engrossing, the protagonist appears to be that of a james bond archetype and it made me interested in pursuing the series.

Cerberus was fun to read because it forced me to continue the series from the first volume I read, because I do respect it as Dave Sim's Lifework. I was pleased to read how much the character Cerberus had progressed from a barbarian to a politician. The juxtaposition between the text, images, and panel placement was spectacular. It was new and innovative, and it made the story flow like water. Wonderful sense of inking too.

I am so glad I read Scrooge McDuck! I never realized how intricate and complex the stories could be for a disney comic, and I already respected "treasures" enough already. No wonder it's one of the most popular comics in the world. It appears Don Rosa really cares about the work given the amount of cultural research that would go into these stories. All the extra characters other than the protagonists were really well written as well, and seemed to make the funny animal comic surprisingly believable.

Unfortunately I was not able to read the spirit story because the page numbers on the smithsonian comics book lead me to terry and the pirates, and after Scrooge McDuck and Corto Maltese, I really was tired of the idea of conquesting westerners. So I decided to read Jerry Lewis meets Wonder Woman, which was surprisingly enlightening. Overall I didn't really enjoy the comic all too much, it was filled with far too much dopey humor for my taste. I could say that I believed that the women's reaction to Jerry coming to the island wasn't really fitting, however no one was all that smart in the comic. However, it was the first comic I've read in which Wonder Woman is being written as a very different character for the 70's. I'm not sure if they re imagined her to try to obtain the feminist demographic, but I do remember hearing from a documentary about how that actually caused some upset with the public because they took away her powers.