Week 5 - Personal Thoughts on Will Eisner's and Craig Thompson's Work

There is only one thing I find pleasant in Will Eisner's work. The way he uses figure-ground as a transition to the next moment in the story is so smooth and well thought out… other than that, I am utterly uninterested in Will Eisner’s work, and I know myself it's for petty reasons.

I read the first 45 pages of "Dropsie Avenue" and understood that there was no singular plot, as it explored multiple stories. The theme of the story illustrates no matter how times have changed, it is in our disposition for prejudice to exist. I would have enjoyed this story immensely if the dialogue wasn’t so colloquial. I was frustrated that, even as a native English speaker, I couldn’t speed through the comic as fast as I wanted to due to the character’s colloquialism. So, I gave up and read the entirety of "Last Day in Vietnam" instead. And I still didn’t like it very much. 

Also, why are all of his characters so soggy and unattractive? Almost every character, regardless of age, suffers from same-face-syndrome. The average age for a soldier who served in Vietnam was 22, the oldest being 26, and I don’t doubt there were a minority of men in their 30s and above, but every single man in that story look anywhere between 40 to 60 years old.

I enjoyed Blankets, although I did not like Craig’s “arc”. I was taken aback when Craig burned the gifts from Raina. I understood why he did so, as one of the themes touches on how even the most comforting memories slowly mean less to us with time. I just didn’t understand how he had such emotional ties with his childhood, but he regards his experience with Raina as simply ephemeral. Is it less important just because things didn’t work out between them? Because it was too painful to remember? Wouldn’t a sequence of panels, where he goes from mildly guilty to quietly content, confirm that he at least he found pleasure in his own doing, and not for God? Also, I almost felt like Craig digressed after he abandoned his faith. His closure with the Bible was very mature, but I found it aggravating that he kept his promise of never wanting to grow up (referring to that one part where he sneaks peeks at a bunch of girls, or compares his body stature to his brother's). Someone could argue that he was just set free to find his own direction in life, thus explains his actions naive, but I’m not convinced by that at all. Teenage Craig seemed much more insightful than Adult Craig. 

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