EuroComics/Hergé

Since I decided to, some time ago, draw a comic page in the style of Carl Barks and NOT Hergé, and seeing as how this week I'm to make a comic in respect to the style Hergé CREATED, I've decided to take advantage and make a comic about Tintin. I finally came up with a good enough concept to make it work and be funny. By the end of it, you can see that Snowy isn't interested in the well-being of Tintin at all, but rather, he was just hungry the whole time. I assume Tintin and the guard become good pals, but he never is allowed inside those city walls. Where are those walls? Russia, probably. Anyway. I hope you can see that it was modeled after Hergé's work. I'm happy with the end result. Higher resolution available upon request!

An Introduction to Manga/Osamu Tezuka

Evidently, I can't draw this week. I feel awful. Anyway, I love manga. Truthfully, it's what propelled me into drawing at all (I don't read it any more, but I loved Naruto and Dragonball Z and all the other Shonen Jump crap I was fed when I was younger). And I love Tezuka. Astro Boy was never my favorite thing of his, certainly I enjoyed his series Buddha more, but this one is more popular, so I parodied it. Astro discovers what it means to be human! And it's not good! Alternatively, I was going to reveal that Nicholas Cage was his real father (since he voiced Dr. Tenma in the 2009 CG fliqué I will never see) but that seemed too obscure, like everything else I write. Done (poorly) in pen and brush ink. I tried to get some realistic machinery going there in the background, but eh, this week is a failure, and I know it well. At least the joke is there. I love how Astro completely loses the gleam in his eyes. Higher resolution available on request!

Stereotype and the Ethics of Representation

Uh-oh. No styles to mimic. I hope I got the likenesses down well enough. I had considered doing this whole thing with the racist stereotypes I represented at the bottom, only having it revolve around their respective world leaders (Obama as the blackface one, of course), but that ended up being too obscure. In this version, Seinfeld's joke ends up being NOT a joke, as a 1940's cartoonist ends up drawing out what is essentially Minoriteam, minus the genius of Jack Kirby's influence. Somehow, that's less obscure than the world leaders gag. Little known facts: Dave Chappelle is indeed a Muslim. The 1940's cartoonist is portrayed by Casablanca's Humphrey Bogart. And I don't like Carlos Mencia, but it was either him or George Lopez (or Antonio Banderas) and I wanted a contemporary fat man to be a part of this. Higher resolution available upon request!

The Legitimation of the Comics/Art Spiegelman

This comic made history. This comic has shown us the viewpoint of Art, his father, and a whole consortium of people along the way. Everyone is flawed, and everyone is angry it seems. Selfish. It's a classic story retold in a not so classic dynamic. And it's perhaps the most important piece of comic book literature to date.

I ended up learning a lot from this. The art itself didn't impress me much at all. Though, it did have a very full understanding of composition and general rules to drawing, it just wasn't as refined as everything else we've examined up to this point. It didn't need to have any of that in order to be compelling. It was all about story.

It's interesting that Art criticizes everyone, including himself, in this piece of work. It's hard for the audience to develop a really strong emotional connection with anyone, and that's part of the beauty of his writing. You are merely a spectator in this partially fictitious world of cats and mice and dogs and pigs (etc etc). The representation of animals across this also takes away the all-too-used 'human element,' further eliminating typical writing traps and clichés and leaving us with an enthralling substance, and a fantastic hand-me-down recount of one of the most shaping events in modern history.

In my own rendition of this style, I give one explanation of Hitler's early behavior, where he may or may not have been inspired to rule due to said event. I'm talking of course about his rejection from art school. It didn't end up being as funny as I wanted it to be (I try to make these amusing, but it's just morbid), but it did become an interesting story in itself. The drawing pictured is actually one of Hitler's, back when he was 17/18. What a different world this would be if he went on to be a nobody artist. History is certainly shaped by strange means. Higher resolution available upon request!