Week 14

Perry Bible Fellowship Almanak and Megg and Mogg

Gurewitch brings a collection of strips that off hand reminded me a lot of the Cyanide and Happiness, with the same kind of strange and twisted, yet profoundly relatable 'pre-teen' like humor that all of us share to some extent. There's an upfront acknowledgment of the cynic inside all of us in such comics, a blunt realization of the masochist like decisions we make some times. 

Megg and Mogg on the other hand felt like a more narrative based assessment of that same sentiment. An embodiment of the inner cynic as characters, there is an interesting constant conflict between the different inner psyches. I felt as though all the different characters- plagued by different things from substance to environment, were personifications of inner struggles that are faced unanimously through most of urbanized society and youth.

Week 12

My Favorite Thing is Monsters and Persepolis occupied my mind for this weeks reading. While I got the chance to read only half of Ferris' novel, I was able to go through all of Persepolis with much time to contemplate on not only the theme of 'women's' comics, but branching themes of alienation and detachment. Going from Ferris to Satrapi, the metaphor of feeling like an outsider- someone under a kind of threat or danger at all times, really shone out of both novels.

The ink work in this piece was absolutely phenomenal. I had picked this book out of a shelf 2 years ago simply because of how drawn I was to the magical mark making- with a medium that seemed like those staple packs of ball pens you could pick up from any stationary store. While the narrative was full of its own twists and turns on language, concepts and surreal landscapes, I couldn't get my eyes to pull focus from the beautiful drawings.

This novel is an honest expression of not one, but so many lives. The minimalistic style of visualization provided a bridge between being in the world Satrapi was expressing, and the alien one I was in while reading the book. Not only was I getting insight into a whole other culture and geography, but was also going through the psychological journey of Satrapi and the process of self realization.