Assignment 6: Underground Comics

I tried to read a wider variety of these, but found most of them to be kind of boring. I think it's interesting that underground comics were used as a way for people to express their voice when they didn't have the opportunity anymore in regular comics. However, I don't think that the stories are necessarily better than what was currently being produced for "kids".

The only one that had some substance to it that felt like more than just an excuse to make comics about sex was Gay Comix. It was about sex, but it was also about how a group of people were being oppressed and expressing some of the experiences that gay people have had throughout their lives. Such as the first issue with the woman going through her life not being able to find the one, and then the man who had gone to the club but was recounting many different scenarios during the night. That comic I thought was interesting, because it was very personal, and expressed the thoughts anyone might have while they're going through the motions of one night.
 These comics felt more genuine somehow, although it could just be that I sympathize more with them than the person who wrote Fat Freddy's cat, where the very first issue was outright accusing gay people of being disgusting.

Another one I read was Dirty Duck, but half the time I wasn't quite sure what was happening. I knew they had something to do with sex, but the clarity of the dialogue and the drawings weren't coming together for me, and I got bored very quickly.

Zippy fell into the same category for me as Dirty Duck, and found the short comics mostly pointless and tedious without much of a pay off in the end.

I also read a few comics from Tits and Clits, more of the Air Pirates Funnies, but again it mostly felt like nonsense.

Good drawings in Air Pirates Funnies, though.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Assignment 3: Comic Strips

The pieces that I read this week were a short series of Little Nemo strips by Windsor McCay, Krazy Kat by George Harriman, and Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterson. Some things I've noticed that all these stories have in common is that they are very precise and straight to the point, compared to what graphic novels and comic books are today. They are short stories in their most basic form. They don't typically last longer than a page, and rarely have a follow up to compliment the first spread. Many of these aren't terribly exciting, but they're still entertaining and are the sort of things you look at and read when you need something to do. You can certainly get lost in them, reading them dry until there isn't anything more and you've spent a few hours of your life without realizing it. Despite the fact that the entertainment value isn't astronomical, they still tend to end on a joke, or a reveal of some kind, or just have something interesting to say. My fa...
Read more

Week 8: Stereotypes

Stereotypes can be a dangerous thing in media, although I think that not all stereotypes are necessarily bad and not all of them are untrue. I think it's a way for people to organize things in a way that makes sense to them, but again they can be dangerous especially if they are taken out of context, or created based off of things that aren't true. One representation/stereotype we were shown in class was the origin of racial stereotyping of black people in the early to mid 20th century. This is a harmful stereotype, and was made as a joke and holds no truth about the physical appearance or behaviors of black people. This unfortunately found its way into media, and then the butt ends of jokes, which ruined any other representation of black people in media and has taken a long time for our culture to destroy that stereotype. I think it's important to give truthful and honest representations of groups of people as a whole, but I don't think that that goes without stereot...
Read more