January 11. 2004 23:22

Reports.

[21:40] Three essays finished, only Comparative Comics and Media Art left. I still have no idea what was the real assignment for the Media Art course, but the teacher promised to pick me a topic for a report that I could write, by the 20th. It'll probably (hopefully) be nice to write, at least if it's as interesting as the course was. But the Comparative Comics report feels like a pain... I've briefly covered two of the keywords, "indies" and "graphic novel", along with the direct market distribution, but I have no idea what to say about the remaining 2, "mani/geeks" and "expression". I think I had some idea after the last class when we got this assignment, but I've completely forgotten it by now. If it ever even was there.

The problem about writing about American comics is that I know nothing about them. Sure, it may be easy for Dion and Matt to talk about them, they've grown up among them, but I've never had any interest in comics from that side of the world. Well, that's not really true, I know several American comics (some of them really good), but any small knowledge I have about the history of Western comics is about European comics. Even Japanese comics are easier to write about, I know a bit of the history because of earlier research and doing more research is easy. But American comics, finding a decent article about them (and especially the change in them in 1970, in depth) from the Internet is actually pretty difficult. There are too many English documents containing the key words, so there are just too many results in search engines. (With the history of manga it's no problem finding a good article among the limited results.)

I wonder what I should do... Sigh. If only I could understand more than 1/5 of what they were talking about in class >_< Well, I guess I have no choice but to go to Google again, and look through my notes once more.

...

[23:22] Sigh, no luck. I found another great site about the history of (superhero) comics, but it didn't add much to what I already knew. I don't think I'll be able to find out what Matt really meant with expression and mania/geeks unless I ask him directly. Well, off to write lenghty text with no content to it...