The Comic Strip

I remember reading the comics section every Sunday and my favorites were Garfield and Peanuts, so it's great that I'm able to read some in this class. It's funny to compare the Peanuts from the 1950s to the Peanuts now, it's drastically different in artwork but still has the cute humor that makes it so lovable. The artwork has gotten more detailed in shirts and in a way more mature than previous years and has gotten to a point where they stopped making changes, because it has already become iconic in the comic industry. It's fun to read these comics and just see and read what was the comedy then and how over the years it hasn't really changed all that much.

Understanding Comics

In the book Understanding Comics, there are a lot of ideas being thrown around that make a lot of sense and really break down the meaning of icons and cartoons. How we relate to a photograph as a real image is saying the same as a cartoon, because we see a representation of a human face and we just gradually abstract the form to relate it to a real face. Saying that is a cartoon can be the same as saying a photograph is as well. It also says in the book that it can be used as icons of what we imagine to be realistic faces just gradually broken down to the simplest form. What is really being said is that cartoons is just a simplified version of what we see in the real world. We see things differently and even see faces in inanimate objects to create a world that is more interesting.

The Arrival

Within this graphic novel there is no words within the pages or illustrations and if there are it's in a language that you can't understand. The only way you can understand is the actions within the illustrations. This is great storytelling because within this book you don't need to know what they're saying because the you can interpret it easily within the panels and you know what's going on, and you can get a sense of what the main character is feeling if you have traveled somewhere that you don't know. The lack of words added to the novel and made it more accessible to people around the world, and it's the same for the main character because he couldn't understand the new world he was in. This is an experience that many has felt and it's a great read to understand it more. 

Max Ernst

The Interpretations of Max Ernst's etchings in his book The Seven Deadly Elements

1) The lady looks like she is dancing or swaying to the rooster or she's dancing for it. Another       possibility is that she is doing a special ritual for the rooster.

2) A person in feathers is looking at a dead body or inspecting the body in their lair.

3) A girl has died and is being buried in a satanic church looks like, since there is an upside down cross. The roosters are evil creatures with a semblance of human form and watch the burial happen with a woman who is going unclothed, and about to do a ritual for them.

4) The woman ends up being used in a ritual by the rooster in a ritual by the rooster or a sacrifice and we see that she isn't the only one.

5) A woman is lying face down in her blood and it looks like she fell out of bed. There's a rooster in her room so it seems that she was either cursed or it killed her or she was compelled to kill herself. There is the Rooster Man by the door with arms up in victory or grief.

6) There is a man, dancing and it seems to be a start of the spell/curse. The Rooster Man is in the doorway watching.

7) It seems like this rooster person is giving a reading to the ladies by a stick and one of the ladies is upset by what she's hearing.

8) Two ladies are hiding or running away from the Rooster Monster. Maybe because they were experimenting on the girls to become like them, and one of the girls has a goose head by her head and she was maybe going to be a success and so she escaped with her friend or her sister.