CarlaLutzLitComics: Extra Reading Week 4: Comic Books

My experience with comic books is pretty limited. I really think they're beautiful, but I never got into them as a child. So for me, reading the Captain America comic book was so much fun. The biggest surprise for me was how wordy some of the comics became. I expected it to be more visual, bordering along the lines of The Arrival by Shaun Tan. I can see the big appeal in them, because as I kept reading through the comic I thought "Okay, just this one chapter," and then something else would happen. Something the Captain America comics are great at is upping the stakes-- just when you think things are bad for Captain America, there's another level, or the bad guy got away, or there's someone trapped on a ship. Because of that element, every page is a cliffhanger of sorts, and it's hard to put down! I feel like great movies are like this, where they layer on more and more information, so that way the audience is always interested and is always kept guessing (even though we always know Captain America will win at the end).

I also read Mary Marvel to see the difference between a female superhero and a male superhero and how their comics may differ. While Captain America was layering one thing over another, Mary Marvel's comic was a lot more singular focused-- there was one problem, and it was catching the bad guy. It didn't have the same page-to-page gripping feeling that Captain America had. Another thing that I thought was interesting was how these comic books portray the characters attitudes, keeping everything very specific, down to how they hit. For example, look at the difference between Captain America hitting someone and Mary Marvel hitting someone. Her slap seems congruent with the era it was written in, and part of me wonders if this choice was made to feminize this comic and appeal more to the women demographic.