Underground comics

Underground comics

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

Is it awkward that the first thing out of my roommate’s mouth as she was reading this over my shoulder was “the cat’s balls are in the wrong place”? And then for a while, that was all I could see. That is until I noticed the style in which the main characters were drawn. If it wasn’t for this class, I would have never given it a glance. I was very rough, very sketchy and just overall ugly. It took a few pages for me not to be distracted by the art and for me to actually notice anything else. Then I noticed that in almost every page, the title was presented differently; I found myself reading the pages just to see how the title will be seen next.

Content-wise, I understood it was supposed to be funny. I knew it should have been, but not to me at least. Possibly it changed with time and is no longer funny or just maybe I’m just too far out of the drug culture to find the humor of it. And also as I was reading it, ii noticed every page has its own little story. Though the end of a page was the end of the story, it could be referenced later on and on other pages. I thought it was interesting at least, although not interesting enough to make me actually want to read it.

Girl Fight Comics

The woman are very masculine. Not at all what I’m used to reading (in manga the men can be girly if its shojo). But the art was more appealing than The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, so I kept reading. I loved the paneling where Fox stabs the man she was sleeping with in the first 4 panel spread. The last two panels are beautiful timing. And then it hit the lesbian make out page. Can we say awkward? It wasn’t even like, “oh romantic moment’, it was just a very sudden make out. I’d have no issue with it if it was so just seemly random. But then following that, the story made some very sudden jumps from the city to an airplane then to the jungle. The transitions weren’t smooth enough for me.

Though I did like the feminist edge it had. It was very different from the other comics we had read previously for the class. I guess I could relate more to the female characters.

Speed Queen Among the Fruedians was hilarious plain and simple. My roommate and I were hysterical laughing. So I sent it to some male friends to see if it was just a chick thing. They ended up laughing almost us much as us. It was a ridiculous story of penises. The feminism is also at a forefront here. And I thought it was well placed.

Gay Comix

In general these comics were a lot more emotional than any others (Well, Thompson’s Blankets kind of has it beat). It dealt more with the relationships of the characters within the short story. Though the art is very different from the others. The lines are cleaner, the backgrounds are drawn in and realitively detailed, and overall, has what one would assume as “clean art”.

Take “Billy goes Out” for instance. Billy is very clean looking: no rough lines, solid shading. It somehow kind of reminds me of reading a manga. I liked how while you get a sense of Billy’s daily life, in the same panel, you get a bubble of what’s going on in his thoughts. It shows the characters’ background without having to do extensive flashbacks. And by the end, I was glad for Billy that he had gotten over Brad, and I just hope that he meets up with Mark again.