For Wednesday: Batman: The Killing Joke and Tuesday Recap

 Be sure to read Batman: The Killing Joke for Wednesday's class and answer the four template response questions (you can find those in the post below). 

Here's a brief recap of some of the things we discussed in class on Tuesday:

Superman began life as a VILLIAN! His creators, Seigel and Shuster, originally made a self-published magazine featuring "The Superman" (above) who was a genius mastermind that looks suspiciously like Lex Luthor! Supervillians actually came first, since the public had a taste for monsters and villains through 19th century literature: Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, Dracula, etc. In fact, you can see Batman's origins in both Dracula (he's a bat!) and The Invisible Man (he's a scientist/inventor). 

Many of the early writers/illustrators of superhero comics were immigrants, most of them Jewish refugees from Europe. So it's not surprising that they created larger-than-life heroes who represented the American way, and could solve the cruel injustices of pre-WW2 America and Europe (the time of Hitler, Al Capone, prohibition, the Great Depression, etc.). Superman flees the destruction of Krypton as a child much as Siegel and Shuster escaped a dying Europe with their parents. 

CARTOONS AS ART: The painting above by Rene Magritte is called "The Treachery of Images," and says " This is not a pipe." The idea is that because this is literally not a pipe (it's a painting) it doesn't have to follow the rules of a pipe. It could be larger or smaller, and could even be abstracted, as long as it vaguely resembles a pipe. Art never IS anything--it's just something that makes us THINK and FEEL. That's what cartoons are in comics: they aren't real people, but they make us see real people in a new light; they're more like symbols and metaphors. 

Just like with CHARLIE BROWN (above), this is not a story of a little bald boy with tiny sausage arms who wears baguettes for shoes (they really do look like that, don't they?). It's an abstraction of what a kid looks like, and it calls attention to what Charlie Brown represents: wisdom (baldness), naivete (baldness),and the fact that he's the main character (baldness--it sets him apart from the other kids). 

As Scott McCloud says in Understanding Comics (1993), "“When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details.  By stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning,’ an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t." 

You'll notice that even 'great' art uses cartoon techniques all the time, replacing reality with expression, as in the self-portrait by Munch below:

This is NOT a realistic picture of the artist, even though it probably does look a lot like him. But it's too shadowy, too smoky, and too dramatic to be real. Instead, it represents an IDEA of him, which in turn evokes a FEELING and an EMOTION. We suggested in class that he seems scared of his own reflection, as if he sees something dark and disturbing in his idea of himself. He also seems to be dissolving into the painting itself, or becoming one with the cigarette smoke. This, too, is a very comic-book technique, showing that art is essentially "cartoony," meaning it evokes rather than reveals.