Comic books

Growing up, I was never into comic books and my older brother wasn't really either, so I was never exposed to the kinds of comics we saw in class today. I was actually surprised how good and accurate the illustrations were. After that class, I have been considering sitting down and reading one. The only comics that I ever really read were like the Sunday paper comic strips, so all really censored stuff. I have this semester read Maus for my Holocaust litertature class and really enjoyed it. It was well written, illustrated, and covered an intense topic. My favorite part was the section where Speigelman addresses his mothers suicide. The whole concept was an amazing juxtaposition because it took a very serious topic and presented it in a comic book fashion, even giving the characters mouse, cat, and pig characteristics.

Richard made a good point to say that the comics were not responsible for the actions of children or any other people. Werthman for one thing had questionable logos, but more than that, as I have been doing research for another paper of mine for senior seminar I am addressing suicide, which is another area where people like to name scapegoats and blame the suicide on other outside factors rather than face the real issues. In the 80's, metal and rock were heavily blamed for suicide, leading to goth later in the 90's.

Although Werthman had tons of ethos, he used it out of context for his own purposes. He made an easy correlation between child delinquency and comic books. Because he had such indredible ethos he was able to say just about anything and have people beleive him. The correlation he made about the boys and comics completely ignored any other factors that could have contributed to the boys' behavior. Richard showed an interesting comparison and flipflop in his opinion when he showed that Werthman favored fanzines and thought the boys making and reading those were perfectly fine.

The information that Richard brought up about the comic council was very interesting as well. I was reading through some of the guidelines and found myself laughing, because so much of what was heavily emphasized on the list people are not bothered by so much anymore. I also thought it was interesting to point out that comics have changed in scope, and have begun to cover other areas besides super heroes, such as political comic books. It agreed with Richard that the comic council and the neccesity to include some sort of superhero aspect to each comic seems trivial and takes away from the real message the author is trying to get across to their reader.

Overall, I thought it was a really informative and insightful presentation. It was very interesting and I learned alot about a topic that I knew relatively little about.