The Graphic Novel

From a creative stand point the webcomic presented a lot of interesting challenges. First and foremost to me, as a writer, was the challenge of creating a functioning narrative in such a small amount of space. Normally, even with poetry, which is my chosen medium, I have a few stanzas and a couple hundred words in which to make a poem function, and even then the poem doesn’t necessarily have to have a narrative. With working on a joke a day webcomic, I was running into the challenge of how to tell a joke with no direction out side of the art and at most twenty-five words spoken. It was a much stronger basis on visual art then I was used to, as the image is what primarily carries the text.
Mostly, when working on these comics, I found myself focusing on the punch line first, feeling that the comic needed to end funny or it wouldn’t be funny. The next step was figuring out how the comic was going to lead up to the punch line and mapping out that. The one nice thing about working within the joke a day medium is that I never had to worry about segueing out of the joke, namely the comic could end instead.

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I was introduced recently to The Defenders of Stan through a friend and have fallen in love with it. DoS is a webcomic/short video series. The premise of the series is that almost all people on earth have superpowers and only a small percentage is powerless - actually, Stan may be the only powerless left on earth, hence the title. The series focuses on Captain Ulta and his powerless brother, Stan, and their daily lives.

This is an interesting approach to webcomic, merging it with live action shots. The introduction (the thing that plays during every episode and runs the title - I can't for the life of me think of what that thing is called) is all hand drawn traditional comic shots, and when the scenes change, they freeze and become grainy as if they were in a newspaper, then change to a new scene. The show rips on classic comic books, such as Superman in episode 04. Stan has to appear before a board of giant heads and is sentenced to The Phantom Zone, which Stan calls them out on stealing from Superman. In addition to referencing classic comics, the giant heads also discuss Family Circus and Garfield. One of the heads tries to explain what the Family Circus cartoon that morning was about, but ruins the joke, often as people do. It's hilarious for the watcher however.

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So, i don't know if i speak for the rest of the class when i say this, but i have found that the creation of the webcomics is one of the more enjoyable things that we have done this semester in class. Not only does it allow us to have some fun with creating a theme and actually producing the comic, but it allows us, the comic fan, to see how much work and time actually goes into making a comic, something that i dont know if any of us were prepared for. When trying to think of a theme for the comic my group and i wanted to produce, we decided that it would be rather funny to take our favorite superheroes and put them in situations that greatly deviate from their norms. Using texts from last night as an inspiration for the narrative situations we wish to put our heroes in, Superheros Afterhours was born. What sets our comic apart from the others is that we decided to take a more unconventional approach with the aesthetics of our comic, we decided that rather then illustrating the characters, that we would use our favorite childhood play-things, action figures, as the cast of our comic. Much like the Adult Swim tv show, Robot Chicken, placing our characters in incredibly unlikely situations is where the comedy lies. Who doesn't want to see their favorite superheroes in their free time?

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A dark sense of humor can take you to some seriously fun places, especially when it comes to secretly giggling at things we shouldn't poke fun at. This is work of Wes and Tony, the creators of amazingsuperpowers.com , who are a pair of "gentlemen" that have decided that no topic is too out of line.

Now, I have chosen one of the most tame comics to appear on this site to display here....I wouldn't want to offend the sensibilities of anyone viewing. Suffice to say that themes like murder, mayhem, prostitution, Hitler, ghosts, and goldfish are what normally carries the day. This type of humor is clearly not for everyone, and even the most jaded eyebrow might pop up from time to time when going through the past comics. They are a perfect example of building your own fan-base, because if you are going to view the site intentionally, then you will most likely enjoy the comics for what they are.

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Graphic novels and comics often seem to push the boundaries on what we have deemed to be acceptable forms of media. Their visual aspects and words can delve deep into the darker recesses of the human mind and pull out some of the most gruesome story lines imaginable in order to prove their point. While many forms of literature seem to dwell on darker aspects, due to both the literary and visual aspects of comics, the point gets across much clearer and also much deeper.

In April of 2006, the web comic artist Vinson Ngo, more commonly known online as Bleedman, published a small story arch of his darker web comic, Grim Tales. In it, Ngo focuses on the horror of 9/11 in a different way. Rather then showing terrorist to be at the helm of the attack, it is all credited to a young girl who received the powers of the Grim Reaper for a day. Not only did she orchestrate this attack, but she also planned nearly every horror that has hit the world since. The main reason behind the actions seemed to be to spur the Grim Reaper back on the track of causing utter chaos in the world.

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