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Understanding Comics (3 points)

     "Understanding Comics" , by Scott McCloud takes a lot  of time to talk about relatively simple concepts, taking a deep dive into the perception of reality for a good majority of the beginning of the book. From a callback to Magritte's "The Treachery of Images"  with the pages filled with "this is not a pipe"-esque statements to the increasing abstraction of the human face until it becomes simply the word "face" or an amalgamation of shapes nearly unreadable as a face, McCloud seems to focus quite intensely on the fact that the personification of images comes naturally to human beings, considering the fact that they personify things that aren't remotely human, such as their cars or cans of soup. Through the process of identity and characterization, a comic book artist can draw just about anything, call it a character, and humans would naturally feel inclined to connect to the character and find ways to relate to it. He also takes a fe
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The Comic Book History of Comics (3 points)

    I personally found this book a fairly enjoyable read. I don't have the best attention span, and I managed to get through this book pretty quickly, which means it was doing something  right. As I was reading, though, one thing stuck out to me about a lot  of the early history regarding the American comic book industry, and it's that it was a powerfully  capitalistic system. When I was reading, it seemed like the only way to "make it" in the industry was to get lucky with some big name company that would eventually be bought by someone with more money than them. It almost seemed like the buying and selling of sports players onto certain teams, except in this case, it was comic book syndicates buying out artists and paying the less "important" artists miserably low wages. It's interesting to see how systems like that were in place and what laws have been put in place to protect the artists who were poorly treated and didn't have the guts to stick up
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The Arrival (3 points)

     From "The Arrival" , by Shaun Tan, I felt a mixture of nostalgia, wonder, among other emotions. It was a somewhat slow beginning, at least for me, because I didn't realize what was going on until the man asked for where he could find a bed using a drawing. As somebody who has traveled abroad before, I think Shaun did a wonderful take on what it feels like to be in a foreign country. His method of using fantastical creatures and a completely invented writing system is stronger than if he had used a language anyone on earth could have connected to. If he had used a simple foreign language found on earth, the readers would have grounded themselves on that, so by using a language that doesn't exist, he plunges them into a world that is nearly entirely unfamiliar to them. The other thing that they can connect themselves to are the other humans in the environment.     The comic itself is beautifully rendered, and fairly long as well, for a comic with no words. It has a
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