Persepolis 111-341

In the second half of the book Marjane enters adolescence and also becomes an adult. She also leaves Iran to be schooled in Austria. the change of setting from Iran to Austria allowed the pictures to become more detailed. Austria does not have the same rules about appearance as Iran had so the characters had features that were not shown in other characters. I also thought that the detail of the drawings had improved a little bit but for the most part remaned simple. Marjane's struggles change in this part of the book. In Europe she has trouble conforming to being a westerner but when she returns to Iran all of her friends look at her as a westerner rather then Persian and she feels lost and does not fit in anywhere.

Persepolis 3-110

Out of all the graphic novels we have read in class so far I would say that this one easily has the simplest drawings. All the characters have the same shaped head with no strong facial features except for mustaches and beards on the men and a few characters with different colored hair. This threw me off at some points because I could not tell who was who in the book. Unlike Maus there are not many pictures of brutality going on. After reading Maus it was good to not have to see so much of this but if I were to have not read Maus i wonder if I having more visual scenes of the demonstrations would have got the point across better about how bad things really were.

Spiegelman Book 2 2-5

Vladek continues to tell Art his story but his health is getting worse.  they finally get out of the concentration camps and try to re-enter society.  Vladek and one of his friends begin working for the Americans doing simple tasks for them.  The same anti-semitism from before and during the war has not been erased.  One of the interesting things about the last half of the book is that there is a real picture of Vladek right after he left the camps.  The only time animals are not drawn in the book is in the cartoon about his mother's suicide but this isn't even a cartoon it's an actual picture.  I think Spiegelman put this in because he felt people should see the actual man of the story for all that his father had to overcome to survive.

Spiegelman book 2 chapters 1-2

so the second book of Maus focuses on Vladek's joureny throught Auschwitz and how he survived in the concentration camps. Vladek uses the same clever tactics that he used in Poland in Auschwitz to survive in the camp. Spiegelman uses the same ideas in presenting the sory as he did in the first book of Maus. The setting for the stroy has changed as his father is now in the Catskill Mountains in upstae New York. In most of the pictures the mice are not drawn as bad as I thought they would be. Only when they take off their shirts or dead mice are shown are they shown to be in bad condition.

Spiegelman Book 1

In the first series of Art Spiegelman's Maus Spiegelman describes his father's experience living in Nazi occupied Europe.  Spiegelman switches from the present time where his father and his new wife discuss how they despise each other to his story of struggling to survive in Poland during World War II.  The Holocaust is a hard issue to discuss but Spiegelman keeps the reader in the story by occasionally stopping the Holocaust description and focusing on him trying to make the book and discuss his father's problems.  the occasional break allows the reader to take a break from the cruelty of the Nazi regime and so to speak catch your breath before resuming the story. Making the faces of the Jews, Germans, and Polish people of animals also helps tell the story.  I thought one of the best drawings was of Vladek (Art's father) and his mother Anja disguised as Pigs which is the animal chosen to represent the Polish.  Vladek says that he was able to blend in more but his wife looked more Jewish.  the picture drawn shows Anja's mouse tail reveled while Vladek's is tucked in his clothing to represent this.      

Thompson 3-9

I was really surprised by how this book ended.  It was not the typical ending to a story and caught me off guard.  Thompson continued to use the style of having many frames without words and continues to go back and forth between time periods although he does this less often then he did in the first two chapters.  

Thompson 1-2

When reading Blankets I thought it went by really quickly.  Unlike Fun Home the author chose to use pictures more then words to explain the story.  there were a lot of panels without any words and even a number of pages that didn't use any words to describe the situation at all. You have to use your imagination a lot more.  Some of the panels don't need words to describe the situation.

Bechdel 2-7

The end of Fun Home was not what I was expecting at all. I thought that the family did not expect the father to be gay at all but then we find out that the mother new all along and that he had numerous affairs with men included teenagers. I thought overall that the book repeated the same things over and over. Bechdel really wanted to point out how she and her father wanted to be the opposite sex. I thought the book could have had a better affect on the reader if it had been maybe four chapters rather then seven.

Bechdel 1-2

I found the first two chapters to be interesting at times but dull for the most part. For most of the first chapter you think that the book is going to be about how the father is forcing the rest of the family to help him in restoring their house. I think Bechdel did this to tell us what kind of man her father was but she didn't have to spend so much time on this. towards the end of chapter one we learn more about the real focus of the story. Bechdel's father dies from being hit by a truck but she thinks its a suicide. This started to gain my interest but I quickly lost it when she began to talk more about her father's history and her experience growing up.

McCloud 5-9

I found the second half of the book to be really dull. I enjoyed the first half because o the history that McCloud showed us and the comparisons and contrast between cultures and time periods. the second half of the book focused more on the creating of comics. To me there were to many examples and after reading numerous examples explaining the same thing over and over I started losing interest. I also thought he started going over things he had already covered in the first half of the book like the influence that art had over comics and peoples views on present day art.

McCoud 1-4

I was somewhat shocked to read about how comics are made. Someone who does not regularly read comics does not think about how much works goes into them. I usually think the hardest work goes into the illustrations rather then the writing but this book really breaks it down to a science. McCloud shows us that comics are broken down into different styles and this can vary on the person writing or drawing. It also can be different depending on the culture or country. he seemed to focus on how American comics and Japanese comics not only varied in styles but how each culture viewed comics.

Richards

This essay focuses on the relationship of the narrator and her aging Grandmother. she uses a lot of dialogue in the essay especially between her and her grandmother. I think she wants to give the reader a first hand look at how each scenartio actually panned out in front of her eyes to give the reader a sense of being in the story and how it felt for her and her grandmother. To contribute to this she went into great detail about the surroundings of the house and the contenst inside it. It's clear that she wants to paint a picture for us and leave little to the imiganation. I though it was intersting that at the end of the essay she wanted her Grandmother to repeat the fishing story because she talked a lot about how her and the rest of the family were irritated about her grandmother repeating the same stories over and over. I think she liked the story so much because it shows how much her dad meant to the both of them and how they still think of him often.

Benson

I feel like a bot of a jerk slamming all of this weeks essay's but that's just the case.  My favorite part about this essay was it was really short.  I was really pleased to not have to sit through another long and boring essay for over an hour.  This story reminds me of David Sedaris's essay from last week.  It's about Benson's relationship with his sister. They spend a lot of time together but don't seam to show a lot of passion for each other.  They both know that they don't always want to be around each other most of the time but they are.  It's almost  like they both were thinking I may not like you but were family so we have to hang out with each other.

Orlean

I also found this essay to lack interest. Orlean describes her freindship with one of the boys she grew up with and his aspirations as a young boy. There was no major conflict or plot in the essay and at many times my mind began to wander. She gives you the impression that Colin is very bright and is somewhat of a trendsetter among his fellow classmates. Everything is perfect in hsi life. That's great and all but, when reading an essay you look for soemthing that you can't find in everyday life. There are thousands of ten year olds who live a life like Colin. I grew up with kids like Colin so it to me reading this essay presented no information that I hadn't already obtained.

Gopnik

This essay didn't really have much of an affect on me. Gopnik describes his daughter who has a peculair imaginary friend who always is to busy to play with her. To him he represenst the average New Yorker who is always on the run and never has time to see his or her friends unless they run into each other for lunch or share the same taxi. when Gopnik realizes that this is what his daughter has made her imiganary friend out to be he goes into depth's of why we don't have time to see our friends face to face. When he figures out that technology has played a critical role in this he makes himslef look like he has cured cancer. Like no else figured this out before him and now that he has made this discovery we will all be able to manage to make some time for our friends. Many of us realized this information we before this essay was published and it comes as no shock to us.

Sedaris

Not one sentence in this essay gave me the slightest form of entertainment, enlightenment, or satisfaction.  All of it was utterly boring.  the story focuses on how Sedaris's family is dealing with his sister getting married and the inevitable death of his mother.  Sedaris doesn't want any of his siblings to get married  but it appears that Lisa doesn't care for his feelings on the topic.  They're all worried bout the mom because it is clear that she's going to die from cancer shortly however she seems to welcome death and the her husband only cares about Lisa getting married. to me it's amazing that someone actually chose to publish it.  Maybe the only thing more amazing then that is Sedaris choosing to write this essay in the first place.  I could probably walk around campus and find multiple people with stories similar to this one.  There's no twist in the story that makes it interesting.   

Strayed

The first few pages definitely grab your attention.  The first sentence Strayed lets you know that she cheated on her husband more then once.  a few paragraphs later she tells us she can't have sex with her husband that she deeply loves because she has a sexual feelings for her mother.  Had to read that part again to make sure that she actually said that.  She tops that off by telling us that she has sex with complete strangers and that's the only way to forget about her mother's death. She clearly wants to reiterate the fact that you should look down upon her sexual actions by calling herself a whore and a slut numerous times during the essay.  The middle part of the essay she just seems to repeat the fact that she misses her mother terribly and that she feels bad about cheating on her husband but doesn't know what to do about it.  The essay begins to regain interest when she decides to tell Mark her husband that she has been cheating on him with numerous partners for the last two years.  Of course he flips out saying that he wants to kill her but he never fully loses his love for her coming to her rescue a few times and having a one night stand with her.  Really sucks to be this guy.  He was by her side helping her grieve her mom's death and she is out screwing random guys.  that basically enede the story for me as I lost interest in the last two or three pages.  

Beard

I was not to crazy about this essay as a whole.  I thought the ending was great but most of what happened in the beginning and middle of the essay was pointless and boring.  she starts off by talking about how her house has squirrels living in one of the bedrooms and how one of her dogs is dying and pees uncontrollably  throughout the whole essay she talks about her dog peeing everywhere which has nothing to do with the main focus of the plot.  There is little focus on gang Lu.  You only have an outsider's view on why he chose to do certain actions.  we know the full extent to the collie's medical conditions though.  I was really captivated towards the end of the story when the shootings started to unfold.  Final say: Not enough attention to the main plot.  The Side plots are a whole other story.    

Cooper

First thing I Have to comment about is the title which I think is great.  The title is mentioned once in the entire essay.  The essay itself has nothing to do with cooking hamburgers  but the one mention of the tile shapes the whole story.  I liked how the plot was consistent throughout the entire essay.  Cooper focused on his quest to be socially acceptable in his school and how he tried to be something that he wasn't.  Cooper constantly fears that his secret will be discovered by his peers and feels that his secret could unravel any minute.  I found it interesting that when he looked back on his high school years his biggest regret was not telling Theresa that he was gay.  This would have altered his whole experience and could have possibly made him an outsider.   

My story

I have been assigned to write a blog for my graphic memoir class but my blackboard wasn't working and I forgot to go get the story from my teacher.  I guess you could say I don't really think to much of the near future but that's beside the point right now.  my personal story is that I'm a freshmen hear at Hartford and I'm from DC but grew up in nearby Bethesda, Maryland.  If you are wondering why I'm so far up north it's because I didn't think about applying to college at all last year until one of my teachers kept bugging me to apply hear.  Hopefully she made a good choice for me.  Yet another example of putting off things.