I have to admit, I had somewhat of a difficult time reading the two books. I have never been much of a comic book reader, and I often had a hard time following the text on the pages--was I supposed to go left first or down first? I eventually got into the swing of it, but I'd much rather read a novel with text that plainly goes left to right and then down to the next line.
One of my favorite things about reading, is picturing the story happening in my mind. And when I would read the text on the pages of this graphic novel, the images that came into my mind were very different than the ones drawn on the page. I pictured Anita as a buff, more rough around the edges looking girl, and yet she is drawn to be muscular with big hips, big boobs, luscious red lips and perfectly messy, curly black hair. I thought that the vampire bites on the characters bodies didn't look right, they looked more like random scratches than bite marks. Most of the pictures were in some way provocative (except for the actions scenes, and when Anita was in her penguin pjs). I was really annoyed with how most of the characters looked like models--the men with their chiseled abs (the female and male gaze)--and the women with the almost porn-star-like bodies--big boobs, hips, lips, long flowy hair (male gaze). The pictures of her with her pouty lips honestly took away from her strong persona.
I thought that Anita's obsession with penguins was a funny/weird coincidence. My old roommate is obsessed with penguins and had tons of stuffed animal penguins in her room.
While I enjoyed the storyline, I was just really thrown off by the graphics. As was pointed out in class, the graphics didn't often mesh up so well with the texts, and I often felt like some information was missing, some of the text in the actual novel was taken out in the graphic novel. I think if I had read the actual novel first, I would have been even more upset when I read the graphic novel.
I agree, it was hard to follow the sequence of pictures, but after a while I was fine. Like we talked about earlier this session, check out "Maus" .The story is awesome and the boxes are not hard to follow like "Anita Blake".
ReplyDeleteAlthough you did not enjoy the pictures of the story being given to you, I did. I thought the illustrators take on Anita and the characters body language was interesting to see. Although I thought there was some discrepancies between between the text and illustrations, it was still interesting.
I wrote the basically the same thing on my blog about the male gaze.I totally agree. the big hips with the red lips is totally male gaze. Although some argue that there is some female gaze, I feel he female gaze over shadows any female gaze present.
I personally loved the illustrations, but I've read graphic novels before. However, I also like to be able to come up with my own imagery of what I think the text should look like.
ReplyDeleteI wrote about this in my comment on Allison's blog. I agree with you, 100% that the male gaze is very heavy with Anita Blake, but at the same time, I know that the way the characters are drawn in the illustrations is just a style that is very prominent in graphic novels. I mean, it's obvious that real women and men do not look like that, so why do people still read it? Why is the exaggeration of women and men's bodies popular? I wish I knew because honestly, I'd like to see a real person, not a hyped up "real person."
I really enjoyed the graphic novel, and if time allows I am very interested in the books. I want to try to get my own feel for Anita so I can try to match it up and see how different my view is from how the graphic novel portrays her.