Lit of Comics Kevin Liang

Will Eisner's "Contract with God" seems to be a tragic story about a man, Fermme Hersh, making a contract with god and living his life based around it.  He lived his life as a "good" man, helping his fellow people and tries to be righteous.  He takes religious instruction and devotes himself to good works.  The man does good and raises a child, only to die from sickness.  The man goes mad, and believes that god broke a contract saying "If god requires it that men honor their agreement...then is it not god, also, obligated?"  After feeling betrayed he turns away from his beliefs and becomes a hard man.  Later on he ends up owning a real estate empire and pays a few wise elders to create a contract with god for him.  Femme Hersh never let go of what happened and what he felt with his contract with god.  Maybe the contract was not properly written, so now he asks wise men of god to create one for him.

The comic book I spent time reading last session was a compilation of Superman comics in its early days.  Superman was very much the same as he is now on principle, the most powerful being on earth.  Clark Kent was always able to find a way to save the day, however the problems and solutions he faced definitely feel dated.  He is supposed to be the "perfect man", but the view of what "perfect" meant only reflected the values of that time period.  In one issue, Lois Lane get engaged with an "Ugly Superman", and Superman tries to break up the engagement simply because "Ugly Superman" is "ugly".

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson is one of the classic comics that remember reading as a kid.  It was always fun and easy to read Calvin and Hobbes as a kid.  There was always something about these comics that felt easy to relate to when I was young.  The dynamic duo Calvin and his stuffed animal tiger, Hobbes.  Hobbes is clearly an extension of Calvin's imagination of his stuffed animal tiger, but Hobbes is also an extention of Calvin himself.  Whenever Hobbes is seen in the comic, it is usually a representation of what Calvin is actually feeling or thinking.  I believe Garry Trueau explained it better than I could.  "There are few wellsprings of humor more consistently reliable than the mind of a child.  Most cartoonists, being childlike, recognized this, but when they set out to capture the hurly-burly of the very young, they almost always cheat, shamelessly creating not recognizable children, but highly annoying, wisecracking, miniature adults.  Chalk it up to either i

Chapter 1 of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics discussed what exactly comics are, and its precise definition.  Finding the right definition of comics was actually quite tricky because comics are in between other mediums such as films and books.  After much deliberation McCloud settles on a final definition of the word. He defined comics as "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer".  McCloud also explored the history of comics, and the some of the earliest forms of comics in history based off of that definition.