For this week, I read two manga: Ghost in the Shell and My Lesbian Experience. I was surprised about how truthful and open the author was with the work. There were a lot of emotions and feelings that were put into the manga that made it feel very real and open. I went into the manga somewhat expecting some unrealistic version of love between women, but it was actually a really realistic experience of someone that dealt a lot with mental health issues. Additionally, the simple style with the simple color scheme is very effective for the subject matter for this comic. If any more simple, it might not have been taken seriously, and if it were any more complex, I feel I would get to caught up in the art style. The addition of the color pink, rather than just doing a traditional black and white, kept a soft theme to the comic, even though the comic was not especially gentle. Finally, I think that it was an interesting story. Although the story is based on real life, I expected some sort of resolution by the end, which we somewhat got in the manner of how the author changed how she thought. However, the author went through the trouble of including an epilogue that showed that she has not really changed since her first sexual encounter. I think this made the story feel even more real, as it makes it feel more like life in that it does not necessarily have a happy ending.
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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