The phonetic spelling of the characters' speech really appealed to me as well. It was very easy to become immersed in the characters themselves; I could almost hear their individual voices. I also really liked the names of characters that were puns, such as Dr. Y. Zowl (wise owl, get it, get it?)
The storytelling, too, was funny and often made great social commentary. The very first strip (p. 29-30) made me chuckle and they just got better from there. As for the catnip/tiger tea in the story, I immediately thought of this as a drug reference but doubted myself for a few more strips ("No way is this about weed!") but when the characters begin discussing different variations of catnip tea, "kitten, kat, wild kat, kooger, panther and [...] tiger" (p. 62) it became pretty obvious that this was definitely a reference to drugs, if not specifically marijuana. I did a small bit of research on this and found that marijuana became outlawed around the 1930's and 40's in America and was misunderstood as having effects similar to cocaine. What I'm unclear on is towards the end of the story, Krazy is having trouble getting anyone else to drink his tiger tea, though throughout the story earlier everyone wanted some. Why is that? What does this represent?
And on that topic of representation, the scene with the ill tiger lily and the violet stood out strongly to me. I wasn't totally sure what this symbolized, other than the lily is generally a desired North American flower and the violet (also a North American flower) is sometimes considered a weed in gardens. If anyone has other thoughts on this, I am really interested in knowing what you think.
As for the Disney Treasures, I didn't enjoy these strips as much as the first ones I read. The Donald strip was pretty funny, I especially liked how Donald is always getting falsely blamed for the antics of his nephews. I was not fond of the strip written entirely in (sort-of) rhymes; I found it a little boring and childish for my tastes. Well, what do I expect from Disney?
Milt Gross was visually very interesting to me (is that photo-emulsion screen-printing?) with the layered CMYK palette. Some of the jokes made me chuckle, like when Doc is poking fun at Dickens, but a lot of the humor was really slapstick, something that doesn't appeal to me too much.
Can't wait for next week!
I agree completely! I already commented on the Tiger Tea before, but to say more, I agree that it does seem like a drug reference. As to people not wanting the tiger tea any more, I think it started with Krazy trying to keep tabs on who was stealing... and then it sort of turned into negative gossip and people stopped wanting it? I'm not really sure, it was a VERY sudden change.
ReplyDeleteI also thought this week's Disney was harder to get invested in. I did like the Donald cartoons, but the others didn't really stand out in my mind and the rhyming one seemed particularly hokey and sort of trying to hard (but rhyme schemes tend to do that to pretty much anything).
I enjoyed reading Milt Gross. I liked how loyal the father was to his son despite being the sort of typical useless husband type so often seen in comics. It was very endearing. It also definitely showed the ideals of the dreamer and the self made man, though I feel that he must have relied heavily on his wife and her mother (he's even living in their house!) to make due with his lack of steady income.
Also, just to say... I'm not under the contributors at the moment so if someone could change that, I would really appreciate it, haha. then I could make my own posts!
ReplyDeleteMaya, send me your email address so that I can add you as a contributor. My email: aherbst@mcad.edu
ReplyDeleteI'm in full agreement that Krazy Kat was a great read. I love Ignatz's obsession with throwing bricks at people. Often I have problems with characters that speak with a written accent, because often its done in a way that distracts too much from the storytelling. But I found that, in this comic, it adds to it. Krazy Kat's dialogue added to the character and made him more interesting.
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot of social commentary going on here, mainly the issue of class. Look at, the billionaire character who won't talk to the rest of the people unless he is broke. Plus, he is always sucking up to the trillionaire. It seems to me that this is a commentary on "the rat race" because Mr. Meeyowl sucks other people into wanting the tea to make money for themselves. Then, they are always trying to fool each other to get it.
As with the tea, I viewed it as more of an alcoholic metaphor than other drugs, although I do get that after reading other posts. It seems to me that the characters get into a drunken, angry stupor. Plus this was written right after prohibition when alcohol was scarce. Something else that links it to booze is the fact that everyone wants to drink something that links them to their own culture (kind of the way that things still are).
I dont know if you all read the comic on the back cover, at the very end of the book. Its a funny strip and Ignatz uses catnip to get away with hitting Krazy Kat with a brick...good stuff.
As soon as I looked at the Milt Gross comic, I thought it was going to be boring. The character descriptions just seemed cliche (but maybe this was written before those roles were cliche?). But I thought for such a silly story, it was done in a way that was pretty fun. Plus, Gross was starting to work with panel design and page layout that is more like what most comics use today. For that, he was hitting some really good points with comic storytelling. I thought that another good touch was the epilogue, where he described what happened to the Spanish lady on the chair. I liked that he filled the gap with that side story.
And as for the Disney comics...
The Donald Duck comics were fun and are classic Disney scenarios. Its people trying to outwit each other and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The other comics were a little bland for me. I thought that the rhyming dialogue was distracting. Disney has enough characters and stories that they have room to hit and miss.