For this week, I read two manga: My Lesbian Experience and Ghost in the Shell. I had not seen or read anything about Ghost in the Shell, but I recognized the name and had seen the advertisements for when the live action movie came out, so I was interested in reading it. I felt that it was difficult to read at first for several reasons. The art style, at times, felt noisy to me. This, and the large amount of text on certain pages, made some of the pages a struggle to get through. Additionally, I felt that the story through me right into what was happening without explaining anything, which made it difficult to follow along with the plot. I found myself going back to reread certain part just to remind myself how the character related to the protagonist. This is both a good and bad thing to me. It makes reveals more exciting and it does not bother treating you like you are any different from the expansive world that it has created. It gives you the opportunity to learn as you read. However, some more preliminary information would have been helpful to the efficiency of reading with clarity. That being said, I found this manga to be extremely interesting and eye-catching. The characters have unique designs and have a nice amount of depth to them. I appreciate how different this manga feels as compared to many of the trope-y manga that I have read. It feels confident in what it is and wanted to be.
One trend that I felt was interesting, albeit upsetting, was that with the incentive of making money by creating comics, the lines of ownership of the artist's creation seem to blur. Of course, other factors lead to the uncertainty of giving credit where credit is due, such as having multiple people working towards one comic. However, I feel that when comics became more mainstream, companies valued the income that comics made over the treatment of the artist that created them. In particular, on pages 109 and 110 of The Comic Book History of Comics that Marvel allowed for the continuation of Stan Lee as the sole credit of their comics for quite some time, leaving artists like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby unhappy with their lack of recognition. Marvel (and Stan Lee) made profit off of Stan Lee's rise to fame, practically letting people believe he was a genius for creating such works by himself. In actuality, talented artists were drawing and plotting the comics while Stan sometime...
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