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.
For the week that we read these, we were asked to discuss whether the comics we read should be considered literary or not. My first reaction was to break down what made something 'literary'. I was inclined to say that as long as something had words and was telling a story with some amount of depth, then that was what I considered literary. However, I realized while talking with team members about this question that I had a new consideration of literary comics. I like to think of comics the same way I think about art, and that is that anything can be art. I do not think that we have to tie down the constraints of what is and is not literary because that can put writers who just want to create into a bubble. Whether I used my old definition or my new definition, I think My Favorite Thing is Monsters is definitely a literary comic. It masterfully uses its media to tell a fantastic and relatable story. Everything about the comic felt real and was very engaging, the art felt in sync...
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