Week 4

This week we studied actual comic books! Everything that we were looking at previously lead up to us finally being able to look at comic books for the rest of the semester (mostly). Starting off from the beginning though we see that Marvel and Action Comics are where the standards are pretty much set. These are the moments where we start to see superheroes that have passed through generations and are now continuing to influence others in multiple media outlets.

But regardless of those media outlets, these original comic books pretty much started everything out in terms of what we consider the modern graphic novel. Out of the comics that were presented for this week, I chose to read Marvel Comics. This comic introduces us to popular superheroes like the Human Torch and Superman. Both are still well known today which can be considered a big deal to people just starting out during this time in the comics industry. Judging the work artistically, you could tell that the artists were passionate, but limited as to what they could do with this medium. Graphic novels were cheap and color was expensive so in order to cut costs they had to limit their palette. This caused certain panels to look more rough and unrefined like the underwater panels. The drawings themselves aren't terrible, they just don't have as much punch because there aren't any real star graphic novel illustrators yet.