We are the Walking Dead: From Cover to Cover

Throughout the volumes of The Walking Dead there are several themes that stick out like a bone protrudes from a rotten corpse.  The ones that I will primarily focus on are guns, family, and gender roles.  To keep it simple I will limit each post to one volume and then tie them all together in a separate post at the end.

As with any graphic novel, it is not just the words that provide the meat for dissection, it is also the images.  These images are found from cover to cover, so it is the cover that I will begin with.  Volume 1, "Days Gone Bye" shows a framed family photo cracked, covered in blood, and littered with shell casings.  The foreground is a group of zombies.  The family is smiling and the father is wearing the uniform of a police officer. The coloring is monochromatic except for the blood spatters.  It appears that the traditional idea of family has been smashed to pieces and left for dead.  

The back cover focuses on a handgun paused before the threat of a group of walkers.  What is the role of guns throughout the novel? They are used to kill people and walkers, so who are the real victims? Are the shooters the threat or the protectors? Since all walkers are dangerous and therefore bears no distinction from one another, how do humans remain identifiable? Do the guns and all of the killing destroy a person's humanity or defend it?

I believe this all funnels into the larger overarching idea behind the whole series.  On the back cover there is a line that reveals we are not living until commerce, government, and frivolity has been eradicated.  We are forced to become self sufficient.  Clearly, guns play a huge role in maintaining self sufficiency in this new zombie infested world.  What does this role mean for the future of the Walking Dead society?  What does the text suggest about the future of our own society with relation to guns?

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.

30 Days of Night: How one graphic novel shapes the femicides of Juarez, Mexico

30 Days of Night: Bloodsucker Tales: Juarez or Lex Nova & the Case of the 400 Dead Mexican Girls written by Matt Fraction takes a true life horror story and puts a vampiric twist on it. The real life story involves the gang rapes, mutilations, and other atrocities that resulted in the violent deaths of over 400 girls and women in Juarez, Mexico between 1993 and 2005 (Diana Washington Valdez, Deaths That Cry Out, 2006).

Do I think that this novel was sensitive to the true life story: hell no! First of all, the artist, Ben Templesmith, did an interview with UGO.com in which he states that his continuing work on this arc involves "pinups" of the clown ladies but he has to figure out "what they would have on their nipples." When asked what he would do if he did not have to work, Templesmith replied, "Just sit around painting pictures of nude women." Was it his intention to bring light to this massacre and bring some dignity back to its victims? Based on the fact that his time could be better spent painting nude women than getting justice for dead ones, probably not. Was it the writer's intention to do the same? If you gauge it by what critics got out of the story...maybe. "Honestly, there isn’t much to the plot and it’s a little drawn out. The mystery is solved without any fanfare and, in the end, those responsible aren’t really punished, but make amends. Of sorts." Soooo the case is "solved" in order to get those who are left behind off the backs of those responsible for finding the killers. That is like saying it is okay to violently murder women as long as you "repent." "Except, the case is solved...in the shadows with hints that it’s never over — and all that’s happened really is that a lot of girls have died and a family has been broken..." Oh, so the murderers are never found or brought to justice, great. We'll just cover it up and brush it off. After all, it is only a bunch of prostitutes, right? It will probably keep happening anyway, so why make a concerted effort for such lowlifes. In their thin, and I mean VERY thin defense, as one critic who panned the movie adaptation about the Juarez murders writes, "You can't make a thriller about indifference." Essentially you have to throw vampires in to make things sexy enough for people to read them, but f*ck the real story. You gotta make things spicy, I get it, but to whose detriment? Clearly the victims in this case have not been given their due by the government, by the law, or by the media that profits from them.

There is little criticism on the novel with reference to the real life killings and what I did find made no connection to women's rights. This parallels the Mexican Federal Attorney General's report that was largely viewed by human rights groups as a whitewash. In both cases, the murders were "solved" and nothing was accomplished with respect to women's rights. I say "boo" to the writers and pretty much everyone who collaborated on this project. Whether or not they had good intentions when starting out, the end product did little to shed light on a disgusting oversight by the Mexican government.

P.S. I am going to be taking a break from writing for a lil' bit sooooo see you next year!

X-Women, not Sex-Women please.

I enjoy reading about the X-Men and I love the characters. What is unsettling to me is how the title "X-Men" underscores the position of women on the team and in the Marvel universe. Though there are women in X-Men and in X-Force and in other X-team that exists, the fact remains that the team is ultimately about the Men. Up until recently the women of X-Men had no book of their own. That is until X-Women #1 was released in June of this year. And I cannot say that I like the looks of this book with relevance to how the women are portrayed. Yes, women (and men) are exaggerated in comics but this new title is downright porn. I will let this video by Brutally Honest do some of the talking for me on this issue.

Literature is a medium that has long been controlled by men. The literary canon that any English major reads from is saturated with literature written by men. Only in recent history has any attempt been made to balance the disparity of women’s contributions. In that respect, what is considered admissible to the literary canon is up for debate as well as what is considered literature. The graphic novel is a perfect example. Just as in the literary canon, the medium of the comic book and its offspring the graphic novel has largely been influenced, controlled by, and catered to men. And in the realm of culture, comics and graphic novels are considered to be on the “low” end of the spectrum, settling within the sphere of pop culture. I believe that graphic novels can be more than just pop culture amusement; in fact they are a perfect medium for postfeminist writing.

Essentially postfeminist writing describes women who are fallible yet capable and accept responsibility for who they have become. This type of writing is exemplified by Kiriko Nananan’s graphic novel Blue. The novel is a story about young girls discovering who they are and who they love. The characters definitely march to the beat of their own drummer which makes them a good example of an independent woman, but at the same time they are flawed which shows the side of their human weakness.

Blue is not characteristic of most comics and graphic novels. The overwhelmingly large majority of comics are written, lettered, drawn, and colored by men. The popular titles still feature women with unrealistic body proportions; however the men are drawn the same way. There is an underground of women centric comics that is growing which gives promise of opportunity for the female in the comics industry. If this group continues to rise in power and talent, which I believe it will, the old boys club of the comic book world will give way to a gender equal industry. Equally disturbing to the current absence of women centric comics is the lack of representation of non- white and/or gay, lesbian, and transgendered characters. Right now comics represent the interest of the men that are in power and by writing these “other” characters in the stories would help to disassemble the “boys club.”

X-Women #1 is beautiful artwork and I can appreciate that. Yet the dearth of female-centric comic books should not be requited by sex. In that sense, I would say yes to Brutally Honest's question of whether or not the release of X-Women #1 is a back step for Marvel. Let's give our X-Women more credit, because right now Marvel is saying that women don't deserve their own title or team unless it emphasizes sex. I would also say that because pop culture represents those who are in power, this reflects what gender group is in power.

Personally, I am really sad and confused by Marvel putting this title out in this manner. I would really like to hear how you feel about this matter. And since I have my feminist train of thought at full steam, I will continue in my next post with reference to 30 Days of Night: Bloodsucker Tales: Juarez or Lex Nova & the Case of 400 Dead Mexican Girls. This title is based on a true story where the murders of over 400 women were left unsolved.

Jimmy Corrigan: What is a Superhero?

F.C. Ware's The Adventure of Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth destabilizes the common definition of a superhero. I am going to begin by taking a look at how the title character, Jimmy Corrigan defines a superhero. I would argue that Jimmy is the same person as an adult that he is as a child and in his mind that person is a superhero.

The boy who grows up without a father idolizes a television superhero called "The Super-Man" who gives Jimmy his mask. The idea of a superhero is important to Jimmy for many reasons. Since Jimmy has no traditional males to fill the father figure role, he supplants that role with that of the superhero. "The Super-Man" reinforces this for Jimmy when he spends the night with Jimmy's mother. In this way, Jimmy was able to bring home a father for his mother, retaining his innocence while creating a source of strength for himself. It is at this point that Jimmy puts the mask on and begins to fantasize that he is a superhero otherwise known as "The Smartest Kid on Earth."

Jimmy's idea of a superhero is someone who is constant, never changing, and easily accessible to children. As Jimmy's costume and persona never change, it accounts for the constancy that is required to be a superhero. Also, Jimmy's perpetual childlike state evidenced by his smothering relationship with his mother and his permanent view of himself as a child, we see the way in which Jimmy's superhero countenance is easily accessible to children.

The non-linear way in which this graphic novel is written underscores Jimmy's idea of what a superhero is as well as twisting the form of the graphic novel itself. Since the story is constantly jumping back and forth, the reader is hard pressed to feel any manner of stability. It is through the leading chapter illustrations that the reader is able to simulate any structure or coherency. This is very much like Jimmy's life. The illustrations at the beginning of each chapter feature the title and Jimmy as a superhero. In many of these illustrations he is in a perpetual childlike state and his "costume" never changes. It is as if Jimmy is trying to create a sense of permanence in his unwavering role as the "smartest kid on earth" in order to fill the void left by his absent father. So the reader, like Jimmy, can find stability in an otherwise chaotic novel through the superhero at the beginning of each chapter.

Essentially Jimmy Corrigan creates a superhero when there is none. He fills a large hole in his life with that of a superhero image and when he cannot find someone tangible to fulfill that role for him, he creates one for himself. That is a very good reason indeed, why he is able to call himself, "The Smartest Kid on Earth."