The History of Comics

We were given a much wider selection of work to look at then our previous ones. In these selections, you can see a clear switch from what comics were but you still view the foundations of story telling. The stories now contain more adult themes, such as violence and war. This reflects a lot of what was going on around the world in this era, and it's said that comics were starting to become very popular in the military and for adults. You can see a clear line drawn between Carl Barks' “Donald Duck” comics next to a “Batman” comic, then next to a “Tales from the Crypt” comic. Carl tries to keep a sweet spin on his slapstick humor, but contains more in depth stories, now. While Batman has a very deep narrative of a dark clothed man and side kick going on some fun and terrifying adventures. In the Batman comics we hardly see bloody violence with our superhero, but then we have “Tales from the Crypt” and it's just gore, violence, and torture of characters going through unrealistically horrific events. The comparison of comics from this era really range from sweet to inspiring, fun to murderous horror stories.
            I found the style choices to be really interesting. The rounded shapes and soft line work in the Duck comics really complete the sweetness of each story. While Batman's hard lines, sharp edges, and brighter then life colors really punch the action into the story. Tales of the Crypt had its own eerie style filled with drips and splatters and heavy shadows, but the art in Tales of the Crypt doesn’t seem to be as important as it is with Batman and Donald Duck. Most of its panels take up a lot of the space and don’t give a lot of room for characters, which could be because the stories are all individual, and the characters don’t need to be memorable like Donald Duck or Batman.


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