Week 5: Contract with God

During this week, I had read Eisenhower’s Contract with God. When reading this comic, I felt as if I was being pursued by a sad and dark Disney story. There were many aspects of this novel that showed symbolism in religion and life. The enticing part of this story that caught my attention was the character development. A man makes an agreement with God to be a good person. After the man’s adopted daughter dies, he blames God and states that God has broken the contract that was stated between the two. The man then, vandalizes the stone with the engraved contract and begins to transforms into a new character. At the beginning of the story, you really start to feel sorry for the man, but as the story goes, you realize that he is turning into an asshole, but it still pushes the story forward along with stronger visuals.

Aside from the story, each illustration in the comic was visually interesting and made the story more powerful. The main character cast harsh strong shadows throughout the comic story. Especially at moments when he was alone, the harsh shadows foreshadow the character that he is either about the transform in or become.  Other characters throughout the story were faceless which means that they are powerless in the situation or that they are hiding something and the progresses over the story.

One of the lessons that I had got out of this comic is that it doesn’t matter about your karma, or how good you have been to others, life goes on and we will all have to face traumatic problems no matter what our religion or beliefs are. 

Week 4

During this week I was very interested in the verity of comic options. The first comic I had selected was Barbie and Ken. I knew that Barbie was a real person, the success of the doll franchise, and the origin of the iconic name, but I never knew that Barbie had her own story line in a comic book. My expectations of this comic book were to see Barbie as empowering. I wanted to see Barbie as someone more than one of those fictional characters that depend on the man to save her in every story. Basically one could say that I was reading this comic from a feminist’s point of view. I was disappointed, though entertained with the stories. The Barbie series kind of reminded me of those popular women’s television shows such as Desperate Housewives, or Sex in the City, except that the audience was intended for young girls. Instead of getting that powerful woman I expected, there was drama and gossip between the characters. When you think of the context of “Barbie”, this would be the way that little girls played with they’re doll by interpreting drama, love stories, and an imagination of a fantasy world that they would want to live in one day. The more I thought of the situation through that context, the more I understood the style of the comic and stories.   

Week 3

During this week I read a few comics from the newspaper strips, Little Nemo. The stories in this series were entreating and expanded the mind of the imaginations, especially in a child’s world. Little Nemo comics were one of those articles you would enjoy reading on a Sunday afternoon at grandma’s house. There are various symbols that represent the society and politics during that time period which had taken place in the early 1900’s when the comic series were written. I would take into consideration that this was ideally written for a child where as reading this as an adult, I feel that a lot of the events happening would occur in someone’s mind while they are on drugs.

Aside from the adventurous stories, there were many things that I did find offensive in Little Nemo. The first context had to do with the monkey that obviously symbolized and African American person. Even though this was written in an era where this offensive slander was acceptable, I felt something else could have been used instead of targeting a specific group of people. In many of the Little Nemo comics, the black monkey was always in trouble, running from the police, getting beat up, or better yet, being the antagonist. Another part that disturbed me was the story element in each comic, which was having the same ending. All of Little Nemo comics ended with the little boy waking up at the end meaning that everything that happened was a dream. In story telling, the revel usually happens in the middle or the beginning and drives the story. It also ruins it for the viewer if it happens in every story.

Overall, Little Nemo can be a very entertaining comic to read, but the viewer/reader would have to keep and open mind that this was shot during a different time era.