Emma's Comic Blog

This week I read Blacksad Volume One: Something Within the Shadows by writer Juan Díaz Canales and artist Juanjo Guarnido. I had been meaning to read it for a while because the art style is just so iconic, the incorporation of the watercolor medium in a Film Noir story gives it a classical feeling. The caricatures of the anthropomorphic animals are on par with Disney films like Robin Hood or Zootopia, but with slightly more human proportions. There's this maid character who's a mouse lady and she looks almost exactly like Mrs. Brisby from Secret of Nym , she’s a really cute design. I found the story to be fairly predictable, it's a pretty standard Film Noir plot. For me, it’s really the art that makes this volume. I wasn't especially compelled by the characters, maybe it gets better in other volumes. I thought there would be more of a twist at the end, but the killer was it just turned out to be some rich guy, Ivo Statoc, that we only have one scene...

I think it’s appropriate to talk about stereotypes in regards to comics, as comics latch on to what’s the most iconic/recognizable image and when a comic artist wants to portray a member of a marginalized group, they’ll go with a depiction that most people know: the stereotype. Not to mention the impact and reach of political comics, which people will take as fact. It was interesting to talk about Gamer Gate in the classroom. When I was in high school, I didn’t really appreciate Anita Sarkeesian’s analysis, in one part because it was told too dryly for my hyperactive attention span, and in another part because she discussed an episode of the original Powerpuff Girls that she argued negated all of the feminist ideals of the show. The episode in question, titled “Equal Fights”, was about a female villain named Femme Fatal who would hold the fact that she was a woman over the main characters so she could escape from crime scenes unpunished. Femme Fatal is an obvious strawman stereo...

Maus by Art Spiegelman is interesting to read in today’s current political climate. I am aware that while this comic was being created in the eighties, there were Holocaust deniers and documentation of this event was necessary. With today’s rise of Neo-Nazis, we are reliving this issue. In Volume II, Spiegelman’s therapist ponders if we need a “bigger Holocaust”. That’s crazy to me: what could be a bigger tragedy than the Holocaust? The only way this message could reach everyone is if aliens enslaved all of humanity. Even still, if humans were marginalized or exploited by an “other”, there would still be racism as evidenced by Vladek still having prejudices against black people for no reason.             As Vladek is telling Art his story, we also get to see their father-son relationship. The first novel even informs the reader that Art is not very close to his father and hadn’t seen him in a fe...