Calvin and Hobbes

If I’d have to choose, I think I’d say that Calvin and Hobbes is my favorite comic strip. I have a huge compilation book of Calvin and Hobbes at home and I’m thinking of digging it out next time I visit. The character of Calvin is just so cute to me. He’s always thinking up little adventures and turning himself into epic super heroes. I really love stories about children with big imaginations and Calvin certainly has that imaginative spark. As a kid, my favorite cartoon was The Rugrats and Calvin and Hobbes reminds of the crazy, made up adventures Tommy and Chucky would venture on. The Rugrats were of course made for tv, so the characters had more room for larger and more detailed adventures, but with tiny newspaper space and usually no color, Calvin and Hobbes get to go on adventures just as funny as the babies in The Rugrats. Calvin is appealing to me for many reasons, yet one really stands out. His vocabulary is very large for such a little character. In one strip Calvin wants to play war with Hobbes and tells Hobbes he’ll be the “the fearless American defender of liberty and democracy” and Hobbes can be the “loathsome, Godless, communist oppressor.” To imagine a six year-old saying “Godless, communist oppressor” is just hilarious to me. We all know that six year-olds have no idea what communists are yet I totally go with it when I read this little boy saying such things. I like how annoying Calvin is to all of the other characters. He’s a total nuisance to everyone around him and he really has no idea. The illustrations are just really cute too. I love the way the characters look. They’re drawn with simple, yet at the same time, bold, black lines. I love Calvin’s giant head full of spiky, blonde hair and Hobbes’ lanky, plush body. The whole relationship between Calvin and Hobbes is interesting. They annoy each other, yet they’re best friends and always have each other’s backs. The thought of this silly little boy with an imaginary friend is very charming. It’s weird how it just doesn’t seem right when they show Hobbes as what he really is: an inanimate, stuffed, toy tiger. Yeah, I really think I’m going to search for my Calvin and Hobbes.

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland

Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo was a very different read. It was kind of weird and not as enjoyable as I thought it would be. With a name like Little Nemo I thought it would be a cuter comic but discovered it was far from what I imagined. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t horrible, and some things about it I would consider cute. The character Little Nemo was very cute when in his bed being threatened by his parents to wake up. Honestly those tiny little pieces at the bottom right corner of every other page were my favorite parts. I think this is because there was just too much going on in the gigantic dream sequences. Every time Nemo fell asleep and delved back into his dream state, the character Flip was messing something up. The dream Nemo and his friend, the Princess, just stood there and complained about everything Flip did while everything turned to chaos. It looks to me that this comic book is probably a very early example of the genre and I understand why the story may seem repetitive and juvenile. It’s very simplistic with its structuring yet highly detailed with the events that unfold. This is most likely because these types of comic books where most likely for children only. This comic doesn’t seem like something a young adult would be interested in. I appreciate things from the past that were some what firsts of their time, but now that we have so many new and amazing options, Little Nemo is just that: a thing of the past. I do applaud the author though, and recommend anyone to read this comic if they’re interested in comic history. People should always know about the earlier works of the genre they’re interested in pursuing. Getting back to the story, I found it a little difficult to read the words in the bubbles. They seemed smashed in there and the dialect of the characters slowed me down a bit. The art was very colorful and the drawings were okay. I personally like comics very clean and refined, more like The Arrival’s. I thought it was a bit racist with the barbarian child being a black kid with clown makeup on with a cannibalistic appetite. When he did something wrong he was referred to with demeaning names and was viewed as stupid and unable to learn. Well, that’s the early 19^th century for ya’. Overall I give in a C.

The Arrival

Wow! The Arrival was probably the most stunningly beautiful comic I’ve ever read so far. The illustrations were amazing and the lack of words left me with a world of possible interpretations to explore. The story is obviously about an immigrant man coming to a strange new world. At first I expected to see him arrive in America on Ellis Island or something, but soon discovered this was an entirely different world. I think the author wants this strange, alien world to represent what it feels like when a foreigner enters a new country. If the pictures displayed a man coming to New York we would understand the story and how the character feels out of place, but by creating a world unknown to all humans, we readers feel out of place right along with the man. I loved the page near the beginning with nothing but little square pictures of clouds. They weren’t just little drawings of clouds. Each and every one evoked a new feeling and kept me astounded by their simple, yet highly detailed forms. I think the author put in that many drawings of clouds to lengthen the time it would take until we turned the page, giving the real feeling that a lot of time has passed. Journeys over seas are never quick and a changing of the clouds can represent days and weeks of time. Of course I loved all the little details and creatures created for the new world. The birds that flew over the ship reminded my of the little origami bird the man made for his daughter. The animal that follows the man around is very cute and added even more wonder to the story. The amount of detail in creating the alien world is amazing. The city, the foods, the flying ships, and the teepee looking buildings are just a few to point out. I loved how after a new character was introduced their stories were folded out across the pages. The old man missing a leg was in a war. It seemed to me like wherever the main character was from there might have been the looming of a war around the corner. At least that’s how I interpreted the giant snake shadow thing at the beginning. The end of this book was very pleasing and heartwarming to see the man’s family joining him in the new world. The very end had to be my favorite though, with the little girl helping out a newcomer.

Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics was a new, and for the most part, refreshing read for me. He pointed out several ideas for me to ponder that I otherwise never would have thought of. My favorite part of the book was the chapter in which McCloud focused on showing a short comic and then announced that the images were totally random and only seemed to fit together because we readers were told that they made a story. It was similar to the exercise we did in class where we had to come up with a story out of those weird rooster etchings. When you really think about it any sequence of images could form some sort of story. With this idea in mind I hope I can think of some really cool ideas for future films of mine. Like a comic book, a film is also made up of sequences of images. Sometimes when dialogue isn’t added to explain everything we’re viewing we’ll need to read the images to tie them together. I guess you could say a movie montage is just like a comic book except the images can be moving, they’re not on paper, and they usually have some spiffy music in the background illustrating the mood. Besides all that, they’re pretty much the same. They both require you to read a sequence of images to interpret a piece of the story. This also reminds me of a cool exercise we did in my film language class last year. We were to show an idea using three, objective images. I showed a picture of a tooth, a lollipop and a desk bell. Alone the images wouldn’t have been able to produce whole stories, but seeing the three images in a sequence could easily read as a tooth was affected by candy and had to get fixed at the dentist. Desk bell, dentist….they relate. Well, anyways my teacher thought it was clever. Getting back to the main point, McCloud’s book did conjure some good thoughts, but at some points I thought he was getting a little too witty. About half way through the book I started getting bored and had to take a break. Maybe it’s just me and my horrible attention span. Other than that it was an interesting read and I would recommend future students to check it out.