Comics fans: A few questions from someone who isn't (yet?)
- Thread starter Thrawn
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There is no rule which says everyone enjoys all of the different approaches to story telling, just as not all trek fans enjoy every story. I would just urge you to try a couple of more at least. Don't give up on them too early. In the end if you don't find them to your liking....that is a matter of taste.....
I think I agree with Nerys Ghemor. In general, I think I get more out of books than I do out of comics. But it may be entirely an issue of personal taste.
For me, this may have something to do with reading speed: if I can finish a comic omnibus in under fifteen minutes, I sorta feel cheated. I believe the latest Angel omnibus cost me more than Full Circle will, and Full Circle will probably give me several times the entertainment that the Angel omnibus did.
While I can understand arguing for quality over quantity to some point, the DS9R, Destiny, and other books have been better than the Buffy/Angel comics (and again, while this may be apples to oranges to some extent because of the different media...I'm attempting a comparison anyway. They're both entertaining continuations of the respective series.)
Yet I do buy precious few comics: I own the two NF comics, a comic book collection based off of Tori Amos's music called Comic Book Tattoo, and the Buffy and Angel omnibuses for the canon continuations of those respective series. I get the Buffy and Angel omnibuses because I liked the series well enough to want to read continuations of them, but I really wish that Whedon had chosen to continue the series through novelizations. (I won't generally buy single comic books because I don't want to read a story in five-minute increments.)
However:
Because of my interest in the Trill, I've been considering buying Divided We Fall off of eBay. Has anyone read this? If so, what did you think? Was it worth it?
For me, this may have something to do with reading speed: if I can finish a comic omnibus in under fifteen minutes, I sorta feel cheated. I believe the latest Angel omnibus cost me more than Full Circle will, and Full Circle will probably give me several times the entertainment that the Angel omnibus did.
While I can understand arguing for quality over quantity to some point, the DS9R, Destiny, and other books have been better than the Buffy/Angel comics (and again, while this may be apples to oranges to some extent because of the different media...I'm attempting a comparison anyway. They're both entertaining continuations of the respective series.)
Yet I do buy precious few comics: I own the two NF comics, a comic book collection based off of Tori Amos's music called Comic Book Tattoo, and the Buffy and Angel omnibuses for the canon continuations of those respective series. I get the Buffy and Angel omnibuses because I liked the series well enough to want to read continuations of them, but I really wish that Whedon had chosen to continue the series through novelizations. (I won't generally buy single comic books because I don't want to read a story in five-minute increments.)
However:
Because of my interest in the Trill, I've been considering buying Divided We Fall off of eBay. Has anyone read this? If so, what did you think? Was it worth it?
You read your comics way too fast!
I have two 50-min train rides every week and I covet the uninterrupted reading time. I'm almost finished the second "Destiny" novel, but on Thursday night I knew I couldn't get it finished in the time permitted, and I hate almost completing a novel but having to put it away to finish later.
Instead, my journey home was paced out comfortably with the finale of IDW's "The Last Generation", the first issue of "Mission's End", and the "Alien Spotlight: Tribbles", plus some interviews in a magazine. I really enjoyed myself. So there are times and places for comics, and times and places for novels.
Sorry I'm jumping into this conversation so tragically late--it's been really interesting to read through--but rather than try to respond to all the points, I thought I might offer some insight into the cognitive principles about why some people love comics, and some people just don't get it, since comics storytelling is as much a science as an art.
Television and film are passive media--meaning you perceive them without any extra cognitive process, the images and sounds just hit your brain, and it actually takes deliberate effort to tune them out.
A book (ie, plain text) is an active medium, meaning it requires extra cognition to understand the patterns of circles and lines that make up words and letters; and you need to concentrate (however subtly) to understand them, while "not reading" is actually pretty easy.
This is the classic left brain-right brain dichotomy, where one side of the brain is analytical and the other side is aesthetic. But, a trait unique to comics is that they're BOTH text and pictures, meaning that it requires (and actually demands) both types of perception, and both sides of the brain, to appreciate correctly.
Some people can do this, and some people can't, some people try to switch back and forth as they go (which is distracting), and some people are just better at one side of their brain than the other.
But now here's the thing that makes this even more interesting: science has long ago recognized that people who are "whole brained" (that is, can use both sides of their brain at once) develop that talent in their middle childhood years, between the ages of about 7 and 14. Not coincidentally, that's when most comics fans actually began reading comics, which directly helped develop the cognitive abilities that they demonstrate today.
I'd even suggest (and this is just my personal theory) that it's also why so many people who read comics well into their adulthood hold such affection for the comics that they read at that time--not just because of nostalgia, but because the expanding perception they experienced at that age makes that nostalgia much more vibrant, resonating well into their later years.
If you're reading a comic book in the space of about five minutes, then you're just reading the text (and, maybe, even just skimming it), and just processing the images as raw information (Batman punches Joker, whatever). But you're not perceiving the aesthetic qualities of the images, which control pacing, tone, and all sorts of other storytelling elements.
Anyway, that's a bit of the science (somewhat simply stated) behind the art.
Television and film are passive media--meaning you perceive them without any extra cognitive process, the images and sounds just hit your brain, and it actually takes deliberate effort to tune them out.
A book (ie, plain text) is an active medium, meaning it requires extra cognition to understand the patterns of circles and lines that make up words and letters; and you need to concentrate (however subtly) to understand them, while "not reading" is actually pretty easy.
This is the classic left brain-right brain dichotomy, where one side of the brain is analytical and the other side is aesthetic. But, a trait unique to comics is that they're BOTH text and pictures, meaning that it requires (and actually demands) both types of perception, and both sides of the brain, to appreciate correctly.
Some people can do this, and some people can't, some people try to switch back and forth as they go (which is distracting), and some people are just better at one side of their brain than the other.
But now here's the thing that makes this even more interesting: science has long ago recognized that people who are "whole brained" (that is, can use both sides of their brain at once) develop that talent in their middle childhood years, between the ages of about 7 and 14. Not coincidentally, that's when most comics fans actually began reading comics, which directly helped develop the cognitive abilities that they demonstrate today.
I'd even suggest (and this is just my personal theory) that it's also why so many people who read comics well into their adulthood hold such affection for the comics that they read at that time--not just because of nostalgia, but because the expanding perception they experienced at that age makes that nostalgia much more vibrant, resonating well into their later years.
If you're reading a comic book in the space of about five minutes, then you're just reading the text (and, maybe, even just skimming it), and just processing the images as raw information (Batman punches Joker, whatever). But you're not perceiving the aesthetic qualities of the images, which control pacing, tone, and all sorts of other storytelling elements.
Anyway, that's a bit of the science (somewhat simply stated) behind the art.
Most definitely.
I specifically teach children - even as young as six - how to "draw on the right side of the brain" in visual art classes. We talk about how left-handed people can access different parts of their brain (ie. the right side) more readily than the majority, ie, the right-handed people. And how artistic people very often lose track of time, and so easily. It's funny, during an art class at school, the students will all suddenly become engrossed in their work, and a little voice will pipe up, "We must all be being artistic, because no one's talking and we're using the right side of our brain." Talking uses the left-hand side, but you need to access the right-hand side to draw well, so... you stop talking. Inevitably these are the times I collect the most amazing examples of child art.
I'm almost finished the graphic novel, "Watchmen", at the moment, for the first time. The last few text-based pages, at the end of each chapter, are quite confronting, because you suddenly need to tap different sets of skills to interpret that material. It's as if the comic pages made you get out of practice. I can imagine many people skipping those pages altogether, to get to the next comic art pages.
I've actually only just started to get into comics in the past 3 or 4 years, due to a combination of the Marvel movies, hearing about Trek comics on here, and getting more into Star Wars and wanting to get a more complete story of it's universe. And I have to admit that I have actually enjoyed them alot more than I thought I would, IMO I find them to be a nice combination of watching something on a TV show or movie, and reading a book. I can see where some people might look down on comics, because TBH I kinda did before I started to read them, but once I did I came to realize that alot of them actually are very deep with great stories, and some really cool artwork in them.
As for reading them, like novels, I tend to read bits and peices during commercial breaks while watching TV so, it can actually take me a day or two to get through a TPB.
As for reading them, like novels, I tend to read bits and peices during commercial breaks while watching TV so, it can actually take me a day or two to get through a TPB.
Yeah, I don't like poetry in general. It's rare that I find poetry that I like well enough to actually own, and anything I do own was something that I had to read for a class and discovered I really liked. Yet somehow I prefer songs with obscure lyrics...and song lyrics are kind of like poetry, in a way.
About the right-brain/left-brain dichotomy:
I can kind of see this, and I kind of can't. You're right about how I'm reading comics: I do mostly read the words and then look at the pictures for a basic grasp of what's going on (although occasionally I'll notice a cute detail or two, or a part of the drawing that jumps out at me.) Pictures illustrate the story; their entire function is for me to get background enough for the text to make sense, to let me see what's going on. This would seem to imply that I'm more left-brained than right (which is weird, as I'm entirely left-handed), and that words are my primary medium of perception. This also makes sense because I have absolutely no drawing/sculpting ability, or the ability to do anything requiring a decent amount of perspective/proportions, for that matter. But it doesn't make sense because the "left-brained/right-brained" concept is traditionally that involves left-brained (right-handed) people doing better at things like math, which completely isn't my case.
But when I'm studying, a lot of times I need a picture and words to grasp a concept, and I need them at the same time: I write out a picture and then diagram concepts or pathways over it, and put it together in my head all at once. I must be using both sides of my brain at once, and I'm doing it because I have to; it's how I understand the material best.
And I wonder how the spoken word relates to all this. I love reading, but I hate audiobooks. A lot of my friends study by listening to old lectures over and over; this does absolutely nothing for me.
Also, I wonder about the left-brained/right-brained dichotomy compared to "everyone has whole-brained capability." I've read enough neuroscience bickering about whether or not this is true to be unsure as to who's right about it. Anecdotally, the left/right-brained thing sure seems true: I've run across too many math/science guys with tremendous logical capability but no ability to grasp poetry, or too many people who excel at metaphor but are hopeless with spatial relations. But, like I said, it's all anecdotal.
I think the explanation is that, yes, there are people whose brains are more geared toward one mode of thought and perception than others, but it's somewhat oversimplistic to claim that a given mode of thought is strictly localized in one hemisphere of the brain. Rather, each mode involves an interaction of areas all over the brain, but the nature of that interaction varies. One type of thinking may involve more activity in one hemisphere, but still engages the other hemisphere as well.
In high school, I knew a pair of enantiomorphic twins -- they looked alike, but one was left-handed, the other right-handed. And they defied the usual assumptions about left vs. right brain thinking. The right-handed one (meaning the one whose left brain was supposedly dominant, since each hemisphere controls the opposite side of the body) was the "right-brained," artistic one, and the left-handed one (meaning the one whose right brain was supposedly dominant) was the "left-brained" one who excelled at math and science.
How is Comic Book Tattoo? I'm getting it for a friend of mine.
That's partly due to the decompressed nature of comics storytelling today, where a story that might've been done as a one-and-done (or even a two- or three-part story) fifteen, even ten years ago is now stretched out to six issues with the trade collection in mind, which results in flaccid storytelling.
This is very true in some instances (at Marvel and DC more than other places) but not for all comics. The IDW trek comics as well as lots of stuff from Vertigo (a subsidiary of DC) have had some amazing single issues. Vertigo's stuff is geared toward eventual TPB release (that's where comics actually make $$$), but that doesn't mean the stories are dragged out just to fit the TPB. The IDW trek books, the first Year Four series as well as the Alien Spotlight's in particular, have had some great done in one stories. Check out the Borg spotlight...very good done in one story.
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That's true, and I was over-generalizing, I admit.
Yes, but no publisher wants their single issues to be bleeding red at publication. They would like to turn a profit on the single issues, and then use the trade as a second bite at the revenue stream. And if the publisher is really lucky, they might get ongoing revenue from the trade.
Not every story. But it does happen.
No real disagreement; I particularly like the density that John Byrne has been bringing to his Star Trek work.
I don't think I have quite the brain power to understand that one. I've read it four times, and I'm still puzzling out pieces of it.Check out the Borg spotlight...very good done in one story.
It was all right. It's hard to evaluate as a whole; every song is represented by a different comic/artist, so of course there were some stories I liked better than others. Without going back upstairs to flip through the book, the comics based off of "Here. In My Head." and "Winter" were some of my favorites, and I remember also liking the pieces that went with "God' and "Pretty Good Year." There was also one comic that felt like it should have gone with a different song. Some of the comics try a little too hard to track every single lyric onto a part of the song, which, given the obscure nature of most Tori Amos lyrics, can result in a disjointed or stilted story, or something that's a little too on-the-nose that pulls you right out of the narrative.
Of course, I'm something of a Tori fanatic/completist, so of course I'm still going to recommend it, particularly if you're getting it for someone who's a Tori Amos fan. I'm not sure how well it would go over for just a general comics fan; not being a big comics fan myself, I don't have anything to compare it with.
Oh, and a comment on the neuro thing: I've also read hypotheses that everyone is originally oriented to be right-handed, and that they think brain dysfunction can switch someone over. The authors involved based their hypothesis, I think, on higher rates of early neurological dysfunction in left-handed people. Completely not comic-related, but interesting.
Thanks for the input.Of course, I'm something of a Tori fanatic/completist, so of course I'm still going to recommend it, particularly if you're getting it for someone who's a Tori Amos fan. I'm not sure how well it would go over for just a general comics fan; not being a big comics fan myself, I don't have anything to compare it with.
She's not a comics fan (the only graphic novel she's read is Persepolis), but she's a Tori Amos fan, and she was mildly jealous that I knew something about Tori Amos (and had written about it for work sight unseen a year ago) that she didn't.
I'm getting her the hardcover. I've seen the softcover in B&N, and given its size I don't know that it would hold up. She doesn't want me to go to the expense, but the difference in price for me isn't significant.
And if Tori Amos is a gateway drug for her into my world, no price is unreasonable.
I've heard this excuse often, but I don't buy it. I have an uncle who had all these DC comics from the sixties, brought these boxes over to our place for a few weeks when he was moving houses, and as I recall I could go through ten in an hour until I got sick of the tacky storytelling. They didn't have the massive full-page images or even two-page spreads that a number of comics like to feature these days (although considering the artwork and print quality of those old comics, I understand why modern artists like to show off the current technical abilities, even if it does accelerate reading at the cost of story). Those old comics had more text, but it was written with young children in mind (or so it seemed to my preteen self) and could be blown through in no time at all. Or else they would try to throw in a ton of stuff without ever allotting the room for the story to breathe, which is a converse but equally present problem. Overall, I'd say I like what trade reprints have done to comic book pacing.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
I've not read it. She said (and I'm paraphrasing from memory here) that while she felt oppressed the past eight years, reading Persepolis made her glad that she lived in America and had real freedom.
I'm tempted to pick it up myself.
AllynGibson:
I realized today that most of that Comic Book Tattoo review likely makes no sense if you've not heard the music. Your girlfriend, however, will know what I mean.
Oh, and I recall being extremely surprised that someone called David Mack was writing one of the stories inside. I quickly concluded this couldn't be the same David Mack, as no one died.
I realized today that most of that Comic Book Tattoo review likely makes no sense if you've not heard the music. Your girlfriend, however, will know what I mean.
Oh, and I recall being extremely surprised that someone called David Mack was writing one of the stories inside. I quickly concluded this couldn't be the same David Mack, as no one died.
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