JTHM

         Review of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut. The novel is written by Jhonen Vasques, and published by Slave Labor Graphics, July 1997. The novel is in black and white, 168 pages. The work is done largely in ink, with a fairly typical page set-up. Lettering is mostly in a semi hand-drawn fashion, as well as all the sound effects. The novel alternates between being text driven and visually driven with large blocks of text on one page, then a large single image panel on the next.
         The theme of the novel is largely exposing the dark and generally useless nature of humanity. This is reflected largely thought the main character, Nny, as well as his victims actions and words. Nny mostly kills those who attempt to cause him pain though verbal abuse, largely as a comment that they are sadistic and cruel, but the methods he uses often involve full scale torture devices. While this is a paradox, the author is still, somehow, able to create a connection between Nny and the audience, largely through a combination of humor and convincing the audience through long speeches that they deserved it. It's actually fairly incredible that he manages to make his readers cheer for a mass murderer who tortures his victims to death and paints a wall with their blood. However, given that most of his readers are between the age of 13 or 15 (or never grew out of that phase), it's not anywhere near as surprising.
        The story takes place mostly in the town where Nny lives, or his basement. At first, the story is a large number of unrelated vignettes show-casing his murders, and explaining to the reader that he has to kill to keep a wall in his freakishly large basement (like, over 5 full houses worth of space) painted with fresh coats of blood or else a demon will come out and kill everyone. The stories begins to develop more of a connection, however, as the novel progresses and turns into two entities competing for control over Nny as his conscience. The first is the "Dough Boys," who want Nny to kill himself and thus release the demon. The second is a floating severed head of a rabbit who refuses to give up on him. Towards the end of the book, Nny ends up killing himself accidentally, and goes to both heaven, where he is told he does not belong, and hell, where he is again told he does not belong because in this universe, hell is for stupid people. Meanwhile, the story follows one of the women kept in his basement's story as she goes through the process of escaping, though eventually dies anyway as the demon gets released from the wall. From there, Nny is resurrected, and his outlook on life changes slightly, but he continues killing, though only for himself. The book ends with him telling his small scared neighbor he has been harassing throughout the book that he is going away for a while, and that he should look out for himself while Nny isn't there to protect him.
      Oddly enough, despite the novels dark illustration and content, the novel attempts to keep a light atmosphere as Nny kills people with sporks, forces someone to test the contents of his refrigerator for freshness, and kills people in generally silly ways. The sound effects and authors comments are normally things like "don't sue me, I'm funny" in reference to him including Taco Bell in his series, and "SNAP, CRACKLE... I bet you're thinking POP" as a sound effect to someones head being torn open. The page where Nny skips merrily out of a building to the swelling chorus of classical music as it explodes form the massive sticks of dynamite he threw in it probably best exemplifies this dichotomy of death and absolute silliness.
      So, after re-reading one of my absolute favorite pieces from 8th grade, I can see why the authors hates this work so much. Going through it when older, I can see how absolutely immature the long three page rants on life contained within the book are, which completely takes away from it. I had figured this would happen a little, but that it wouldn't be enough to stop me form enjoying the series altogether. However, it largely was, and if you are older than about 14 or 15, this book is likely to be too graphic and generally filled with opinions and viewpoints that are fairly wrong, that most of it will be unfunny, and generally meaningless. However, there are still a few scenes that are hilarious if one likes dark humor, largely the ones in which Nny is just killing people instead of discussing his life views with them, and so if you're able to put up with listening to a depressed youngin whine every once and a while, you should enjoy the book.

4027 Winks

So. This is my final project for Graphic Storytelling. It was originally going to be a lot longer, but I didn't have time. Not too much else to say, other than I wish I had a tripod.

Idea for a Graphic Novel

So, I have to make a short comic for graphic storytelling. I've decided that I should do it with black and white photography. The comic will center around the growth of a young man with extreme insomnia as well as narcolepsy. It should be fun, and I don't want to say too much more and ruin the surprise.

Narative Theory

For GS we had to read an exert from a book on Narrative Theory. For me, what was largely the most helpful part was the section about lighting. For me, I do enough photography that I've given a large amount of thought to the angles at which things are shown. However, because I have always been working in a very casual, and minimal, setting, I have yet to really experiment with light. As such, this section which explained the different ways to use light to your advantage when working with any medium was incredibly helpful. For example, the use of a darkly lit surrounding and a slight outline lighting on two people to suggest that there is a romantic setting had never occurred to me. After reading this article, I want to use my next few rolls of film to try out a bunch of different things with a flashlight or some such to see how I can use light to my advantage without having to be shooting on a large set-up.

Sooooo much structure...

Last assignment for this batch. We were told to write a poem with a ridiculously ridged format (see if you can guess it), and the put them into a comic. I had originally wanted to maintain some semblance of originality by making my comic from a picture of a graveyard and using each of the tombstones as "panels," but that didn't work out because my camera apparently doesn't expose half my film to light at random intervals, so I lost the vast majority of my pictures. So here is what I wound up with instead.

The images themselves were made using darkroom techniques, and the only thing I did with photoshop was  the text an positioning. Any framing was done chemically. By the way, I'm not sure how effectively this was communicated, but I actually have a fairly positive view on death as a sort of freeing inevitability. Everyone is going to die, and the world is so old than virtually nothing we do will matter in the long run. The trick is to make the most of life while you got it, and see if you can help a couple other people while you're at it cause, hey, why not?

Newspaper Poetry

So, another assignment. This time, we had to remove words from a newspaper to create a poem. I made two along a similar idea.

Both of these are made from the idea of having a "poem" which makes absolutely no sense, so the reader is left gripping for a meaning that isn't there, and applying their own (though the first does have a little bit of a theme). Yet, the second they get to the last few words where it becomes clear to them that this was all nonsensical, and everything makes sense in a last bit of humor.

The future

For gs, I was assigned to make a single panel image in the same style as a work called "The City" which depicted the past, or future, as related to a scene from the work. I chose the first image:

 http://www.nebulous-cargo.com/masereel/woodcuts/city1.html

and made this:

I suppose it has a message to it, or some such. It's my personal belief that nothing we do can or will have drastically lasting consequences, and that the future of this bustling rail station is a forest around a single, abandoned track is a reminder of this.

Mind Map

Another task for GS. For this assignment, I had to make a "mind map" (a flow chart on crack) explaining a lecture or television program I had attended/seen. Because I don't take any really obviously visual classes right not except for gs, I decided to try to make a mind map of a concept in physics, in this case how resistivity works in circuits. Hope you like it! (Click for full view)

Coraline Soundtrack

Not at all related to Graphic Storytelling, or comics in general, but the Coraline soundtracks is one of the best movie soundtracks I have ever heard. The music is dynamic and interesting, totally different form anything else I've ever heard. The over all combination of the darkness of some sections with the somewhat childishness of others creates an incredibly unique and effective atmosphere. I strongly urge you to listen to at least a couple of the songs off it if you have the time, and these two are a good place to start:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8ry1f_3Lsk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxs2vS2gJ-c&feature=related

An Exelent Example of Vissual Aid

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/12/world/middleeast/0212-egypt-tahrir-18-days-graphic.html?ref=world

I found this graphic while looking through the New York Times website, and cannot say enough how much I like it. In 6 frames it completely gives the viewer a full view of the recent revolution in Egypt resulting in the old president stepping down. The use of color coding to highlight which factions had control of which area in combination with text provide a very clear representation of the situations at a given stage. The pictures lining the bottom of the map give a much more personal and emotional feeling to the piece, bringing the reader in. The few moving arrows and shifting of the "camera angle" provide a dynamic feeling, and allow the viewer to appreciate the scale of the protest, as well as provide additional clarity. Finally, the text is short and succinct, giving accurate explanations of the situation without detracting from the overall visual nature of the graphic.

Intstructional Vissual

So, for GS I had to make an instructional guide to some task or skill using visuals. I chose to make a brief tutorial on meta-trolling. Now, for anyone who is not familiar with the concept of a troll, a troll is a person who goes to forums or blogs and posts comments or threads specifically for the purpose of getting other people mad. So, meta-trolling is trolling by falsely accusing someone of being a troll. Enjoy.

 

Oh, and I suppose it might be helpful to know that  http://paradoxdgn.com/junk/avatars/trollface.jpg is the most well know visual representation of an internet troll.

Worst... Graph... Ever...

http://www.fjhs.ednet.ns.ca/math/circlegraphs.htm

While I could of put this graph as an image, I wanted you to be able to see it's original content; the graph is from an instructional website for making pie charts. Now, looking at the graph, it might not be obvious what the issue is, which is exactly what makes it so bad. As a general rule in informational graphics like a pie chart, the visual area needs to be proportional to the percentage of that component. However, when one uses 3D graphs, it is very easy to forget this rule. By making the graph in terms of volume instead of area, larger sections are proportionally far larger than smaller sections. This creates the visual effect that Tuition and Fees account for more than 10 times as much of the total cost as room, when it really only contributes about 4 times as much. Further more, by makin the graph 3D, there has to be some amount of forced perspective created by "angling" the graph. What this actually does, however, is stretch the potions of the graph that are lower on the visual, and shrink those that are higher up. The end result is, again, a loss of visual accuracy in the pie chart. There is one last component of this graph that makes it misleading, and that comes from the organization of the graph. This chart seems to have decreasing values as one moves clockwise around, from Tuition and Fees to Room, to Board. HOWEVER, Books is a smaller portion of the total cost than Transportation. By placing it out of order, it is likely a viewer will think that books costs more than transportation, further misleading them. I am also disgusting that the graph DOES NOT HAVE A TITLE. As of right now, I am only guessing this is a pie chart of where college costs end up coming from, but as of right now I have no idea which college, or if it's something else entirely because whoever made this visual neglected to tell me. My final issue with this graph is what it's being used for. The graph is presented as an example for 2D pie charts. The page this is on does not teach you how to make terrible 3D graphs like this, it teaches you how to make actually functional 2D ones. This horrible graphic is not even relevant to the circumstances it's presented in.

(In case you couldn't tell, misleading graphs [that weren't intentionally made that way by myself] are one of my biggest pet-peeves.)

Hypercomic

So,basically, a "hypercomic" is a comic based around the idea that using computers and the internet, one can have a panel layout that is constricted by pages. This means you can do all sorts of fun things, like have the entire comic be on one continuous line, or have multiple offshoots from one panel. For the class, we were asked to read and give our impression of this hypercomic:

http://e-merl.com/pocom.htm

At first, I thought it was really cool. The general message I took from it was that any time you do something that seems little and uninteresting, in reality, there are all sorts of things happening around you that are fantastic in nature. What seems like something as small as giving a beggar a coin can have drastic consequences. In fact, I'm normally all for things that stretch the rules of a media, or format, which this does constantly. However, this time, I feel like the execution could have been better. Many of the side stories occurring seemed uninteresting, and poorly drawn, compared to the others. Furthermore, the many off the side stories that were well done, almost seemed incomplete, and could likely have been more fully developed without detracting from the rest of the comic. My final complaint, which is easily my biggest, is that the comic was too long. The comic could have been half the length and expressed the same message. The side stories were not interesting enough to keep my attention, especially because almost all of them involved 30 seconds to a minute of hunting to find where to start reading if you wanted to go chronologically.

Overall, interesting to look at, and fun to check out a few of the side stories, but it's not worth it to read it all.

Past Stuff

Hey,

So this is a new blarg made to fullfil the requirements of a Graphic Story telling class I'm taking. I'll try to post other cool stuff from outside of the class too to keep at least a little fun for the two of you that stumble upon this on the interwebz.

With that in mind, this is a link to a fumetti graphic novel I made a little while back. Hope you like it.

http://rakdos-ninja.deviantart.com/gallery/25304896