Hannah Montana Vs. Wolverine?

If you didn't hear the news that has all the fanboys astir this morning (or afternoon, or evening, or whenever one wakes up. we're not prejudiced against late-risers around here), everyone's favorite mouse-eared conglomerate has purchased comic book bastion Marvel.

You can read more about it here.

What does this mean for the future of marvel franchises? Will the Marvel movies that have been coming out like clockwork lately actually get... *gulp*... worse?

Disney has had a pretty stellar track record lately, so I don't think that fans of the Marvel movies have much to worry about. In fact, with the influx of ideas, personnel, and most importantly of all cash, i think Marvel movies could actually get a whole lot better. And if they don't, at least they'll be squandering the maximum amount of possible resources in the process.

...

I don't see Disney keeping too tight a fist on the comics side of the business, at least not at first. I really think the biggest fireworks we are going to see from all of this are going to be in the form of irate fans worried about the direction of their precious storylines.

But seriously, who doesn't want to see Punisher and Aladdin in a Baghdad brawl over opium smuggled out of the palace? Maybe a Snow White and the Seven Dwarves reboot starring Wolverine as Grumpy? there's potential here, people.

Comics on Katrina from NOLA

I saw an article in yesterday's New York Times about Josh Neufeld's grahic novel "A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge."












Looks like an interesting work, and the subject matter is certainly contemporary. Usually, I don't get swept up in this "disaster-brings-out-the-best-in-us" kind've artistic catharsis, but it looks to me like this is a novel that can stand on its own merit, and not merely as a piece of artistic detritus left behind to futilely try to address the mess in the wake of a tragedy.

You can read more about it on the Times website, here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/books/24neufeld.html

McCloud in the Gutter

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud talks a lot about the gutter, the space between two comic panels. He writes that in the gutter, the mind "takes two seperate images and transforms them into a single idea" (66).















Why McCloud chooses to provide us with a grisly axe murder to teach us about gutters rather than a more wholesome scene is unknown, but I like it. I like it alot.

I especially like McCloud's metaphor on p. 67 in which he refers to closure as the grammar of comics and visual iconography as the vocabulary. So what is the gutter, then? The place in the brain where the language, all these icons and images and words, are made into meaning?

Interestingly, McCloud chooses to discuss the gutter between panels before he actually discusses panels themselves. This didn't strike me as particularly jarring or backwards at the time, but when I started to return to the text I thought it was a little bit bizarre. To really understand how comic artists get the most of the gutters, you have to know how the gutter functions in relation to the panels, right? Any thoughts on why McCloud chose to discuss these two aspects of comic art in this order?

My only theory is that it relates to the nature of the discussions themselves. His discussion on gutters is brief, and part of a more abstract discussion of closure and sense in comics, where his discussion on panels is a little more concrete. He really can't describe the phenomenon of closure in comics without talking about the gutters. It's kind of like if you had to describe what a sandwich was to your backwards cousin who'd never heard of the phenomenon of sandwiches before. You'd probably tell them what a sandwich was in general before you'd start talking about all of the specific materials that comprise a sandwich, but I bet somewhere in your description you are going to have to mention bread, and probably explain what bread is.

That backwards cousin metaphor is awful, but it's so awful I'm keeping it, and hopefully returning to it as often as possible this semester.

Spectacle of 9/11: Through the Lens of deBord

"The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself because the economy has already totally subjugated them. It is nothing other than the economy developing for itself. It is at once a faithful reflection of the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers."

--Guy deBord




















Josiah and I discussed how deBord's conception of Spectacle related to the events of 9/11. The above aphorism is a suitable commentary on the commodification of the event. As deBord indicates, the actual occurrence of people dying in the collapse of buildings has been obfuscated by the economy of spectacle. Instead, what has become preeminent are the appearances, political maneuverings, and capitalization of power that has occurred in response to the terrorist attacks.

There has certainly been an "objectification of the producers," both of the incident itself and of the ensuing spectacle. Blame for the tragedy gets mercilessly thrust upon political adversaries or maligned ethnicities, but the blame for the spectacle is so far-reaching and all-encompassing that it's difficult to truly assign responsibility or authorship for the circus to any one entity.


















Who is to blame for the endless media cycle that regurgitates tragedy as entertainment and masquerades spectacle as information? news networks? the public, hungry for the consumption of the spectacle as a facet of the economy they are used to and subjected by?