The use of color in "Pride of Baghdad"

There are so many ways of coloring in graphic novels. Black and white, monochromatic, the whole color spectrum, and everything in between show up on the pages of our favorite graphic novels. I am very interested in the whys and hows that artists/colorists choose their palettes. The idea I am most interested in is the use of a largely monochromatic palette with seemingly random spots of color thrown in. What those colors are, where they appear, and what they are defining mean quite a bit when you are dealing with a primarily visual medium. I am going to be taking a look at "Pride of Baghdad" by Brian K. Vaughan with artist Niko Henrichon. This is a graphic novel inspired by true events during the Iraq war.

"Pride of Baghdad" illustrates the uses of color perfectly. Throughout the novel the artist uses a palette of golds, yellows, and greens which underscore the ideas of the sun, life, growth, and heat. There are only three major moments in the story where this differs.

The first is a flashback in the beginning of the novel wherein Safa revisits the time in which she lost her eye in a battle that also took part of her pride. The colors here are blues and purples tinged with blood red to highlight the flashback, the helplessness that Safa felt in that moment, and the pain of loss.

The second moment comes in the middle of the novel when the lions reach an abandoned palace. As they enter further into the building, the sun cannot fully reach them and the lions end up in a dappled darkness colored, again, in the blues peppered by blood red. The darkest blue and the blood red paint the visage of a massive bear that belonged to the former owner. The lions are nearly helpless against the animal's strength and it is here that Safa loses her other eye. The fight is all but lost until Zill manages to move the battle outside in the sun where the pages regain their brighter palette. It is in this moment that I realized that the artist takes us in to darker spaces when the lions feel threatened and helpless. The spots of red at this time symbolize pain and loss, but not death which red is sometimes used to illustrate.

The third and final moment where there is a change in the color palette comes towards the end of the novel. Here the lions are on the top of a building from which they view the great, blood red horizon. The horizon is a foreign thing to the younger lions who heard about the concept as a thing to behold. It is something that Safa is not able to physically see now because she is completely blind but thanks to Zill's vivid descriptions, she can see it in her mind. The animals are transfixed by the horizon until they are gunned down by U.S. forces who claimed that the animals were charging them. The men describe the animals in death as being "free." Here the blood red color symbolizes a complete death, a finality, and to the soldiers that killed the lions, a sense of freedom.

That is not to say that I fully agree with the idea of death=freedom, especially not in this context. I would also like to point out that there is a panel of a close up on the American flag that further complicates the issue. Of course the colors in thispanel are blue and blood red. Does that echo the idea of freedom since America is the home of the free or does that echo the idea of death/finality because the American men are taking lives/are having their lives taken? Or...does it convey a sense of helplessness and fear on the part of the soldiers who are in a situation that they have questionable control over?

And please remember: this is not a post on my views or opinions on the war in Iraq nor is it a place for that discussion; this is a post on the use of color in a graphic novels that happens to take place in that moment.
For further reading on this graphic novel in the vein of what the novel might have conveyed about such positions, I would direct you to a wonderfully rich blog post at dorkgasm.com.

"Wolverine: Origin" and man's attempts to tame the wilderness.

Over the course of centuries nature, specifically that of the North American variety, has been personified as being female and dangerous, something waiting to be tamed into submission. In the handful of literary instances that nature has not been deemed female, it is otherwise written as neuter but never male. Margaret Atwood addresses the different ways in which literature personifies nature in her lecture series Strange Things: The Malevolent North and Canadian Literature. I have found this useful in my reading of Wolverine: Origin by Paul Jenkins.

Part one begins with "The Hill," the parcel of land in the Canadian North that young Logan's father built the family estate on that went from lush and free to being dominated by a man made mass of a mansion. The first three panels show it s transformation from a lush, green landscape, to a snowy, icy, broken and manufactured by man kind of environment. The locals even go so far as to describe it as a place "built on a foundation of tears." Sounds rather foreboding. Like nature is doing fine all on its own and then man has to come along and put his stamp on it, setting the scene for some sort of evil to take place.

Atwood writes that the North is largely characterized as a "frigid but sparkling fin de siecle femme fatale, who entices and hypnotizes male protagonists and leads them to their doom" (3). She cites a poem by Canadian poet Robert Service that is particularly interesting:

I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods;

steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods.

Long have I waited lonely, shunned as a thing accurst,...

And I wait for the men who will win me...

So who in Origin is being enticed and who is that is being accurst? Clearly in the beginning nature is no friend of young Wolvy who is cursed with allergies and sensitivities to any sort of outdoor interaction. Yet later, after he is cast out from his home and his family, Logan transforms in to the Wolverine we know and love today: the fearless cigar smoking outdoorsman.

I especially like the cover (shown at the top of the page) where a wolf like creature is hidden by the shadows of nature. Is Wolverine part of nature? Is he a spawn of man's rape of the land? Does that make him a hybrid of man and nature? It would seem that Logan's early life on the hill cut him off from nature's good influence and made him susceptible to its dangers and maladies.

After the first appearance of Wolverine's claws Rose describes him as a "monster," "beast," "monstrosity," and "something less than human." All this was said while the "bitter, cold wind howled over the leaves." Hmmm...looks like momma nature has returned to take back her son and whip his wussy allergied ass into shape!

The further away Rose takes Logan away from civilization, the faster he heals until they land in the Yukon Territory. This place Rose describes as a "hellish" "desolate spot" "at the edge of humanity." In other words, this very spot where man is attempting to mine the land, in the middle of the icy North is the epitome of man vs. Nature. This is where Wolverine's true mettle is tested. Which will he side with, his mother (nature) or with his father (man)?

In Part IV Rose further alludes to the female characterization of the north when she muses "how angry Mother Nature must be that she can't cover such an ugly stain on her pretty dress." The stain is the mining camp and the dress is the summer foliage. In this same chapter Rose labels Logan as a "man of the forest...a hunter" while Logan responds that his new found abilities emanate from "an urge." So now that Wolverine is on the edge of wilderness, he has found his true self, the forest hunter self.

This self is fully realized when Logan encounters a pack of wolves in the forest and takes his place as the alpha by killing the leader. Then it's all barefoot in the forest, using his bare hands to feed himself and his pack. So in the end, man's attempt to have his way with nature resulted in Wolverine. What exactly does that teach us? In this case, mess with nature and she will sic Wolverine on you. We learn that nature will always win. Man's attempts to conquer "her" are futile and so she is always left brooding and waiting for the man who will "win" her.

In March I will be doing a lot of reading and researching so you will not hear from me again until April. I plan on doing something about form or color and maybe drawing on a few different books for examples of these. I recently found in my local library Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Frank Beddor's Hatter M. That actually leads to a whole other issue; I found them in the teen section of the library which just goes to show that people, even highly educated ones, are still so far from taking the graphic novel seriously as literature. In any case, I am excited about the books and looking forward to wherever they will take me!

The Body as an Instrument: The Role of the White Violin in "The Umbrella Academy"

I have been working on ideas for Gerard Way's The Umbrella Academy for quite some time because I have been a bit overwhelmed by the different avenues I could take with it. My overall interest in parsing this graphic novel resides in the idea of the body as an instrument. Yet within that idea there are many facets such as the body as a literal instrument, in this case a violin. There is also the idea of the body as an instrument in that it is an object manipulated by an outside force for example, a villain using a musician for his own evil purposes. The manipulation idea can branch off into many other ideas as well such as the use and abuse of women's bodies. I also had ideas of using the meaning behind the number seven and there are WAY too many for me to comprehensively attack. Interesting note on that, there are seven musical tones and seven colors in the rainbow (and when you have all seven colors together that makes white, the color of her violin "costume!"). From the musical aspect I looked into the idea of music as a weapon or as a means of torture and there are many fun political ramifications to be dealt with there, especially via the US military. Then there is heavy emphasis on the importance of music which can certainly be attributed to the author's love and involvement in this sphere via My Chemical Romance.

So the question remains, where did I decide to take this ship after learning of so many routes of travel? Basically I had to go back to the book and pick a few panels to focus my attention on. So here we are:


If we follow the bouncing ball we can clearly trace the line from Vanya's humanity to her objectification as a musical instrument. In the very beginning and throughout her adolescence Vanya is held back from the superhero measures that the rest of her siblings get to participate in, instead being told that there "is nothing special" about her and to go play her violin. She is isolated from her family who cannot even manage to attend one of her recitals. It is evident that she has been manipulated as an object from day one, initially by her father and subsequently by the Conductor. We can physically see her objectification present itself in the way her body takes the shape of a violin. The scene in which Vanya receives the phone call from the Conductor she is pictured as having an exaggerated bow to her thighs, highlighting the violin form.


After a final falling out with her family, Vanya gives in to the Conductor where she is "refashioned" into an instrument of death. In the midst of this, she finds out her father had known all along that she had capabilities and she was actually the "most dangerous one." In this moment we see that Vanya has really been "played" and objectified her entire life. In objectifying Vanya as an instrument her body becomes "an object and is separate from its context" (Shaw and Lee, Women's Voices, Feminist Visions, 2009). Interestingly, according to Shaw and Lee the media and entertainment industries have a large hand in perpetuating this objectification of women's bodies. So the very industry that sells the music Vanya would create and the industry that markets the story of the Umbrella Academy are the vehicles by which women are continually oppressed in this manner.

Accordingly, Vanya, or Number Seven, is no longer the agent in her actions. She is being manipulated by her father and then the Conductor. Even after killing the Conductor does Vanya regain control of her body or does she continue to carry out the plans of her father or those of the Conductor? That is to say, at this point, are Number Seven's actions her own or is her body still an instrument? In Eva Cherniavsky's article on the body, the author posits that "the abstraction of labor from the embodied person of the laborer makes possible the theft of his energy and creativity in the production of value to which the laborer loses all claim." Since Vanya has been used for someone else's purposes for so long she has in effect lost the rights to her musicality. Her music is not her own nor does she receive compensation for her labor. Ultimately she is an object, an instrument, used for an outside party's gain.

At some later date I think I would really like to revisit some of these other ideas dealing with The Umbrella Academy and Vanja. But for next time I will delve into Wolverine and man's attemt to tame the wilderness.