Kristin Becker's DTC Classes at WSU

Unfortunately, I was ill and unable to attend the actual museum. After viewing what’s shown online, it seems like it was quite the exhibit! I’ve walked past the art museum many times and have always been interested to go in, but never have. After seeing the contents I’m especially motivated to see them in person and will make an effort to visit once the whole quarantine business is done with.

The first exhibit I chose was Dirtbag by Eroyn Franklin. Franklin is a comics artist, illustrator, ceramist, public artist, educator, and occasional shadow puppeteer based in Seattle. On her website, she says that “Dirtbag is an in-progress graphic memoir. In my early 20s I embraced a dirtbag lifestyle fueled by idealism and the search for authenticity in the world of drunks, radicals, and sundry riffraff.” It seems as though Franklin took a bit of a rebel stance in her youth. The illustration seems to be an over dramatized depiction of a family watching their home burn to the ground.

While I’m not sure how accurate this is to the authors intentions or the true meaning of the illustration, but from her description of the work itself, it seems like they come from a very personal place. The coloring is very bright and uses distinct bright colors. It uses lots of shapes and curves to outline the details of the house, family, etc. Color seems to be the primary outlying detail in this comic.

The other comic I chose was Cash ’68 by David Lasky. Upon researching online, I couldn’t find much info on Laskey himself so I can’t really touch upon his background. The comic itself depicts a story of the life of Johnny Cash. It tells the story of how in January of 1968, following a year of debt, addictions, being a poor husband, etc. It says that Cash states he went deep into Nickajack Cave but also says that Nickajack Cave was flooded at the time Cash claims to have entered.

It goes on to tell the story of how in January of ’68 he divorced his first Vivian. Vivian then marries Dick Distin. Cash and his band, The Tennessee Three, then perform two very famous concerts at Folsom Prison with guest appearances from June Carter, The Statler Brothers, and Carl Perkins. The performances recorded by Columbia Records and later released for commercial purchase.

There is a skip to February 22 when Johnny Cash proposed to June in London, Ontario during a performance. It then shows February 29 where June is accepting the Grammy for their duet “Jackson.” It also has a text bubble revealing that June and Johnny are engaged. It then goes to March 1 when Johnny and June are married in Franklin, KY.

This work definitely uses a more classic style than the former. It has more of the boxed, clearly directed reading styles in that its left to right whereas the last one was just one image on its own. This has juxtaposed scene to scene transitions where events take place in between them. The art style itself definitely uses lots of colors to make the pictures pop, as well as lines to box everything in and make it coherent to undertand.

While visiting the Fine Arts building last class I was exposed to alternative comics from here in the Pacific Northwest. The artist that caught my attention the most was Mita Mahato. She is comic artist that resides in Seattle, Washington. She is known for her use of collage and multiple layers of paper in her comics. Mahato makes great use of a scalpel to create and layer shapes in her comics. The comic of her’s that I chose was a zine illustrating a story of space travel for an alien. Her materials contrast each other very well which brings out the fact that it is multiple layers of paper glued on top of each other.

Her closure and time frames are very much action-to-action. In the comic “Unidentified Feeling Object,” we see an alien fly around and perform multiple actions rather than talk with dialogue. She uses traditional panels to enclose her space. Mahato also creates a lot of work directed toward aquatic life conservation. Another element she uses well is line work. She creates many textures that are very unusual to a traditional comic format. I believe she is very successful with her style and allows the reader to view her work from an abstract perspective. We must make up our own minds and meanings with Mahato’s work. That is what struck me as the most interesting element to her comics.

Her format is through what is called a zine. I was unfamiliar with zines until I saw her work. Basically, they are a deliberate sequence of images fit together to convey a message. Without dialogue that message is interpreted from the readers own perspective.

Hello friends! For this blog post, I want to write a mini reflection of the comics and zines I saw, and adhere to the guidelines to ensure we talk about McCloud’s ideas of time frames, closure, and other items he’s mentioned over the course of our time together in class, and throughout his novel.

The first thing I want to say was that this experience was absolutely amazing. I was talking with Kirk about how I felt more cultured and aware of the process that it takes artists to create work – in a lot of ways, art work is like writing a good poem: it can take years. One of Jericho Brown’s poems took ten years to complete. There is no linear or right way to create, publish and share with the world your form of art. I think, after visiting the exhibition yesterday, I have a better understanding of that.

Unidentified Feeling Object, by Mita Mahato.

With that being said, there were a lot of examples that were presented to us on Tuesday. The one that caught my eye, however, was a small zine that seemed to be crafted rather personally – the cover of the zine was handwritten, and the information itself was disclosed in a small, almost cardboard-like material, that was not fancy or textured. It was plain and honest. This particular zine was called “Unidentified Feeling Object”, by Mita Mahato.

When I opened the zine, I realized that the cover was an illusion to what was inside: the paper had been scanned. It was a collage, put together by the author, but it wasn’t the original draft of Mahato’s work. It had been run through a press of some sort, where the pages contained a glossy shine. The panels that caught my attention were on the second page. Though the zine is fairly short – three page turns short, I believe – Mahato manages to capture attention with not only the title, but with her creative and artistic abilities. The story  line on the pages with multiple panels had a very direct line: read from left to right, 

Unidentified Feeling Object, by Mita Mahato.

then move down and across to read from left to right. This was repeated for four panel sequences, and though shapes of the panels stayed the same, small things changed, like the movement of the spaceship, and the ripping of the heart from the craft.

The direction of the panels then changes on the following page, where the heart spirals down, and the reader’s eyes automatically follow the line of dashes that direct the heart to the forest below. The spaceship continues in a different direction, and flies off without it. This causes for three possible lines of direction to focus on: the spiraling heart, the spaceships trajectory into space, and perhaps even the rounding of the trees that seem to corner the right side of the page. Size is also something to pay attention to in this panel sequence: the spaceship is extremely small, but the heart and the trees are fairly large,

Unidentified Feeling Object, by Mita Mahato.

making the assumption that the ship is gaining distance from the “earth”.

As far as closure and time frames go for this zine, I would argue that there is limited closure, as Mahato gives us a pretty straightforward story arch. The panel space doesn’t change and seems to be very consistent, so I would argue for this particular zine that Mahato focused more on the design elements that we learned, rather than the design principles.

Thanks for hanging out with me this long! I hope that this gives an insight into my thought process for this assignment, and what I want to focus on in the future.

The comic that I decided to write about from the WSU Museum Collection Study Center is Life Lines by Mita Mahato. I was interested when I was looking through the book because it was not a regular comic book, none like I have read or seen before. The comic was a small book that required the viewer to think about what is going on as the panels go forward. It is not easy to understand what is happening because it does not come out and say it, instead it uses abstract messages to convey a certain message.

The texture of the book was rough and smooth, the cover looked as if it was made of cardboard while the inside of the book was marked out of recycled paper. The comic book did not have any color that was used throughout the entirety of the comic. There were many shapes and lines that were being displayed throughout the whole comic book. Each page of the comic was its own panel which made it easy to read because it was a basic horizontal direction. There were many different examples of unity in the comic.

Because the comic didn’t have any color and used many shapes and abstract panels throughout the sequence, it made me feel as if there was a hidden message or many hidden messages. Just by reading the words, it is hard to understand what is going on, the artwork in the panels threw me off but I believe that taking more time to understand why they are present may help in understanding the meaning for creating the comic. One example of time frame was the first few panels, there was a moment to moment sequence the was presented, that showed the process of creating the number four. Because there is no color and a large amount of negative space, it puts emphasis in the motion to motion.