Batman The Killing Joke

Question One:  I'm a little creeped out and a little intrigued by the text.  This isn't a normal Batman comic where the villain does something wrong and Batman goes to "save the day".  It's almost as if Batman has been tired of his "routine" (fighting crime with Joker) and wants to call a truce so to speak.  Joker seems to have gone off the deep end mentally and starts doing things that are not characteristic of his behavior (ie. Robbing banks, taking over a industry, etc...), he instead tortures a man by trying to make him go mad and shoots his daughter in the spine to cripple her.  

The ending was by far the weirdest part showing that Batman is only human, being taken down by a single bullet and ending the legacy, all from a nobody, just an ordinary guy.  He then talks about how he'd get married, settle down with a wife and go to heaven.  It's like the birthing of a villain, showing how easy it would be to take down a man in a suit.  Batman isn't invincible, he's a human man in a suit with no powers, and uses gadgets and inventions to help him fight crime.

Question Two:  I can connect to both Batman and Joker in this comic.  For Batman, he's stuck in a routine; Save the day by defeating the villain, locking the villain up, villain escapes, repeat.  Batman is looking for a way out of the endless cycle by coming to his senses and trying to break the loop by doing something different.  Batman isn't some off world superhuman being, his parents were killed by muggers, he inherited a fortune, but instead of seeking revenge, he used his own personal experience to help others. 

As for the Joker, there was a lot of backstory told in this comic that shows how and why the Joker became the way he is.  Sometimes it's a series of decisions or just life events that change who we are and test the character of ourselves.  For the Joker, it took a turn for the worse and because of that, he became a villain.  Some people can find rhyme and reason with doing bad things, others do not, and I think it's a test of who people are, the severity of the situations and how we react to these situations that show who we really are. I wasn't the same person I was years ago, no one is, and that's because situations and happenings change who we are as people, it's how we evolve. 

In the end, I have sympathy for both of them.  Both Batman and Joker were hit with hard times in their younger years, but the test of each of their character is what sets them apart.  Batman chose to help others while Joker's mental state vanished and he became mad.  

Question Three:   If I had to take this story into another medium, I would make it into a live action movie.  No animation, no cartoons, just purely cinematic.  

If I had to change anything about this to fit the live action movie, I would dive deeper into the psychotic of the Joker and how it came to be.  Reading the comic, I wanted to get more into the Joker's head.  I feel like if I did the movie, I would based it more around the Joker and his insanity than with Batman and his guilt of possibly killing the Joker.  Really get into the backstory of both characters to draw in the emotions from the characters to the audience to show that decisions made throughout your life shapes who we are today.

I also feel the live action movie would be the best format for this story because (although possible), it's hard to really get into emotions and a persons thoughts through animation, I feel as if using human beings to portray the level of craziness (I found that Heath Ledger played an excellent Joker), and sympathy is something that a lot more people can connect to on a personal level.   

I would also tie in the epilogue directly into the movie (the birth of a villain killing Batman), only for the sole purpose of just showing how fragile humans are.  When I think of a super hero, I think of unnatural powers, and almost a state of invincibility, and showing Batman die at the end just goes to show that at a blink of an eye, the once great legacy of Batman could all be ended with a small bullet.

Reconsidering the Superhero

For this week, I read Black Panther.  I know earlier this year the movie released, which I didn't see, but I knew about Black Panther from my teenage years, but never paid it any mind because it didn't seem like a Superhero or world I wanted to be apart of.  I now see what the hype is all about.

First thing that grabbed my attention was the story. Black Panther is the king of his people and has to deal with villains.  The thing for me that separates Black Panther from other super heroes is the fact that Black Panther is a king, which means it adds to the story about having to rule as a king and fight evil, whereas most super hero comics are about the heroes fighting the villains and nothing more.  It adds a complex level of struggle as the hero to fight and rule.

Art direction is the next subject.  The only thing that really confuses me about Black Panther (and maybe it was explained in earlier issues), is that they dress and fight like a tribe, but they have advanced technology to use. A lot of the panels are in large scale whereas most comics use smaller panels on each page.  More other than not, I found myself zooming out to look at a bigger panel, which is a good thing in my opinion because a single large panels can give emphasis on a subject matter or even tell more of a story than more smaller panels.  Another thing I noticed is the constant use of emotion in the characters faces, which helps drive the story being told. 

I can't say Black Panther is my new favorite comic book hero, but it has peeked my interest in learning more about it.  The movie also got decent reviews and I've heard it's good, so maybe I'll check it out sometime.

Women

This week I read "This One Summer" by the Tamaki cousins.  It's a graphic novel that narrates the life of Rose and her family's annual trip to a cottage for vacation. 

The first thing I noticed in This One Summer was the artwork.  In most of the graphic novels I've read in this class up until this point, the art style has been, kinda rough.  Not that it was drawn poorly, but the art is usually clean, bold lines and sometimes colored.  With This One Summer, the artwork is soft, and the line work looks like it was done with a paint brush which adds a delicate touch to the art.  I also think the choice of not using color was a smart choice, because towards the middle of the graphic novel, I found out that her mom is suffering from depression due to a miscarriage she had awhile back, and the solid black used with the monotone grays really shows the emotion of depression.

Another big thing I noticed was the story.  I'm not quite sure if this is fiction or non-fiction, because of how well the story is told.  Everything about the story is believable, there are no super heroes, no monsters or worldly creatures, just a story about a girl and her family on vacation.  The story starts off as just a normal girl on vacation with her parents, but then Rose meets the store clerk, starts to develop a crush on him, then finds out the girl he's been hanging out with is pregnant, and so on. 

The last thing I noticed was the characters in the novel.  Each character has his or her own personality.  Rose is the typical teenage girl, developing a crush on a older boy, rebelling against her parents.  Rose's friend's mom is a sort of hippie, all natural, spiritual.  Rose's dad is by far my favorite character, he's down to earth, kind of the "cool" dad (One thing I absolutely loved about his character was the fact that he mentioned Neil Peart, which is the drummer for Rush, which is my favorite band).  It's one thing to have a really driving story, which I believe was executed beautifully, but when you add in characters with their own unique personalities, it becomes a work of art. 

I was a little skeptical of how this novel was going to be, but truth be told, by the end of it, I wanted to find out more.  Did Jenny have the baby? How is Rose's mom dealing with the depression? Do they go back to the cottage next year, and if so, is her friend still going to be there?  I think that's what sets apart good novels and masterpieces, the constant desire to find out more about the story and characters after the final page.

Contemporary Literature

So this week I ended up reading Eightball by Daniel Clowes.  Eightball is a series of contemporary literature comics wrapped up into one book. 

It's hard to start about what I thought about this comic.  It seems like Eightball was written awhile back, maybe in the 80's or 90's because of the content.  It almost feels like an underground comic due to the nature of the content (Sex, nudity, drugs, cussing, etc...), but with a contemporary spin.  A lot of the panels didn't make a whole lot of sense, for example, in one of the comics the main character Clay is inside an adult theater watching porno, and he briefly describes the line in the men's room being awful and that he'd never go in there.  A specific porno shows up and he's drawn to one of the characters, so a guy in the lobby tells him to go to the men's room to seek answers.  When Clay arrives to the men's room, he's greeted by what looks like a guru of some sort.  There are many scenes like this in all of the comics that don't entirely make sense, although I'm not sure if they're suppose to. 

The stories are very character driven, but also has a strong story as well.  All of the comics usually show or talk about an issue in the current world (80's-90's in this case).  For example, in one of the comics, a man gets arrested and as they're driving down to the precinct, they see a prostitute on the side of the road working, so they arrest her.  Shortly after, the two cops are arguing about which one's "turn" it is to have sex with her, and one of them actually has sex with the prostitute.