Week 11: Comics as Contemporary Literature

I really liked Chris Ware's work.  I felt that it was simple and elegant, a sort of mordern way of reading comics.  I enjoyed his storytelling, with how he would often incorporate words in more of a graphic design piece with his comics.  With newer comics, each works to reinvent itself, and I feel that with Chris Ware's work specifically, he is working on reinventing himself through the format of how his comics are packaged and viewed:

I feel that his clean and isometric style speaks a lot to the modernization of the medium and I really enjoyed his work.

Additionally, I feel that authors and artists keep getting more and more creative the merging of text and images.  This is especially true with Aesterious Polyps, another comic that features a very streamlined style.  In my opinion, this comic departs so much from the 'traditional' comic form we have seen previously and I would personally define it   I really enjoyed that this author didn't feel limited by the panel and thought, in the most literal sense, out of the box.  I think this comic does SO many things well; it uses the color palettes to help differentiate between Aesterios and everyone else as well as a different color palette for each flashback.  Additionally, when Aesterios and his wife Hana are in an argument and they are seeing less and less of each other's sides, he plays around with giving them opposing colors as well as different styles of drawing them to emphasize the differences in how they think.

This is so effective and part of me is very curious to see what this would look like in an animated format, because I think this is such a cool way to tell stories visually.  I actually wasn't sure whether I would like this comic when I first started it, but I loved the muted color palette and the art style so I kept reading it.  Now, after finishing it, I'm glad I read it all the way through, because I feel that the way this story is told is in such a new and innovative way.  Even with how the comic ends (which I won't post for no spoilers) is something I would have never expected but it seemed to fit the tragic story well.