I was hoping the first word would carry more weight. :)
But I’ll make sure the later bits are more clearly titled. This is just an intro.
I started reading comics exactly with the Disney ones. I was maybe around 5 or 6, couldn’t read yet, and had to go to hospital for a few days, maybe a week, felt like more at the time.
Couldn’t do much, there was very little TV at the time for me (I’m old enough that Portugal only had 2 TV channels, at most), but I could look at the pictures and a slightly older kid could read them to me.
That’s where it started.
What he said. The key to “getting” the art in comics is coming to understand that the art isn’t just an illustration - something done after the fact to tart up the all-important text. It’s part of the storytelling itself, and it’s trying to tell you things the text isn’t telling you. (At least it is if the comic is any good at its medium.)
Understanding Comics will show you what the art in comics is trying to do - and I mean that literally, as Understanding Comics is itself a comic. (And a fun read! - um so far as it goes for analyses of how an artistic medium works, I mean.)
I didn’t discover D&D until several years later, myself, but it was certainly a natural fit when I got there for exactly that reason.
Exactly. And that’s a problem because…
Which is what I kind of expected but it’s like learning to read all over again to try to twist my head around to that mindset.
Ha, yeah, I can see how that would be enormously formative. And the fact is that learning how to read comics is undoubtedly a hell of a lot easier when you’re young and more flexible/adaptable.
I was kidding. The title is fine. I am just just a “Bananas” fan.
I pluck a single stickered banana from each bunch
I… I feel like that should be a crime 😛
Corrections:
“You [The?] faint scent of banana lingers”
“repuduation”
“Interest in [is?] inherently interesting”
“In A Movies”
It is at the very least a “dick move”.
Excellent corrections, @Mercanis! If I had an axe, you would have it!
Maybe a better example: Unforgiven is a fantastic movie, arguably Eastwood’s best, but it’s a deconstruction of the Western genre, and probably wouldn’t mean as much to someone who hasn’t seen a lot of Westerns (specifically, Eastwood’s body of work). It’s that much more powerful when your expectations are subverted.
(I had a friend who hated Unforgiven because “I didn’t feel excited during the big ending scene”. I think he got the point of the movie, but he hated it because it didn’t feel like a traditional Western.)
Not quite ripe is my favourite too!
And that was a beautiful picture. Excepting for the marvel stickers, what was that about?
I grew up on Asterix and Mexican comic books
I remember Fantomas (a gentleman thief/james bond type). I vaguely remember it was racy and he was not exactly a “good guy”. Probably not meant for kids.
I also remember Memin Penguin which has portrayals incompatible with modern American sensitivities.
Yup. This goes doubly for Watchmen. Not only was Moore and Gibbons playing with superhero comic story tropes, but they were also messing with the format itself. Stuff like not having sound effect text during fights, the storytelling that jumps between perspectives, right down to having splash pages that highlighted pivotal story beats instead of being dictated by visual impact.
You see that kind of thing all the time in comics now, but it was groundbreaking at the time.
(comics history nerd engage!) It was very well done, a master class in techniques, but not technically groundbreaking. The things you describe had all been done before somewhere in the vast prior history of comics (e.g. no sound effects had been done in V for Vendetta, and before that in various Steranko things in the 60s), even if they weren’t necessarily commonplace for a typical superhero comic in 1986.
One of the most interesting stylistic choices in Watchman wasn’t a decision to change a traditional superhero format but rather to adhere to it: Dave Gibbons decided to do the entire series sticking purely to page layouts that used permutations on a 9-panel rectangular grid. It was a format commonly used by Silver Age comics, but one that had become regarded as a bit rigid and old fashioned by 1986. Gibbons set himself the challenge of finding new and exciting ways to use it. It also simultaneously linked the story being told, which deconstructed old-school comics tropes, to the original material.
Very late to the banana party, and I hate to be the guy, but have you (@tomchick ) thought of the kid coming later that day to buy some Marvel bananas he heard rumours of at the school yard. And when he arrived, all special bananas were plucked… He will learn that greed is the only way forward from now on. Be first, not last. Being last is for jerks. Good job, Tom!
I felt similarly about Kingdom Come
Well, the joke’s on me. The bananas never turned. I got stuck with green bananas. I tried to use two of them – Iron Man and Captain America – in a blender, but I couldn’t even peel the skin off them! The other two – Black Widow and Hulk – are still sitting in my kitchen, as green as the day I brought them home.
Hmm, these might even be plantains or something. :(
Marvel and Meaning, Part 1: Just Plantains?
I think you’ve got mutated bananas.
Hulk’s gamma radiation doesn’t sit well with bananas. Who knew?
If the blender doesn’t work: Green Banana Smash!
Well, in the tradition of every Qt3 thread being about food, doesn’t it seem weird to y’all that it’s been over a week and these bananas are still green?
I’m no banana authority, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a banana that stayed permanently green. And they’re obviously bananas because I shop enough to know what the #4011 on the sticker means. But, seriously, why would bananas stay green so long? Is this something supernatural? Or is it like the time my ice cubes were morphing into terrifying ice spiders, but I was assured it was perfectly normal and even provided links to scientific insights about spikes growing on ice cubes. Because if water is so confusing, it must be terrible hubris on my part to suppose I can understand a banana.