Mickey Vader

Believe it.

Disney buys Lucasfilm and announces new Star Wars film for 2015.
(For the Comics students here's Dark Horse's reaction to the acquisition). For everyone else, remember this is not just news. Think of the implications this has for what we have been discussing during the course of the semester.

How To Read Comics I

 "To say that Nancy is a simple gag strip about a simple-minded snot-nosed kid is to miss the point completely. Nancy only appears to be simple at a casual glance. Like architect Mies Van Der Rohe, the simplicity is a carefully designed function of a complex amalgam of formal rules laid out by the designer. To look at Bushmiller as an architect is entirely appropriate, for Nancy is, in a sense, a blue print for a comic strip. Walls, floors, rocks, trees, ice-cream cones, motion lines, midgets and principals are carefully positioned with no need for further embellishment. And they are laid out with one purpose in mind - to get the gag across. Minimalist? Formalist? Structuralist? Cartoonist!"

Nancy 're-mixes' by James Benning.

How To Read Nancy by Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik.
Ernie Bushmiller, Selected Nancy Sunday Strips

Please keep up with the readings in the Duncan&Smith Power of Comics and start working your way through the rest of Understanding Comics and Maus.

Audiences and Study Guide

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Ang, "The Nature of the Audience"
Gandy, "Tracking the Audience"

Here is the study guide.

The Social Construction of Race, Part Deux

This is the bulk of readings for the 'discourses of race' section of the course as we wade through it this week and next. Please have these articles read in the order posted. Pay particular attention to Zook's article on the Fox Network as it invests that political economic perspective that is so well dramatized in Bamboozled as well as the Means-Coleman article on 'black sitcoms' which is a good example of textual analysis.

Kristal Brent Zook, "The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television"
Robin R. Means-Coleman, "Black Sitcom Portrayals"
Donald Bogle, "Workplace Dramas, Ensemble Casts 1990s Style"
Chyng Fen Sun, "Ling Woo in Historical Context: The New Face of Asian American Stereotypes on Television"

Searching for Culture, Creativity and Resistance in Comic Books

Chris Ware, Panels from "Wingnutz"

Bart Beaty - "Searching for Artists in the Entertainment Empire" from Comics Versus Art

Cosplay at Occupy Wall Street?

Henry Jenkins - "Super-Powered Fans": The Many Worlds of San Diego Comic-Con
you can also access a copy of the Boom: A Journal of California printed version on Slideshare here.

Jeffrey A. Brown - Ethnography: Wearing One's Fandom
Brian Swafford - Critical Ethnography: The Comics Shop As Cultural Clubhouse
Joli Jenson - Fandom as Pathology
John Fiske - The Cultural Economy of Fandom

Finally, totally unrelated breaking news:

Superman quits Daily Planet day job to go online: mourns "how journalism has given way to entertainment" making it impossible for him to fight for "truth, justice and the American way".

Signs, Meaning & Power

Articles related to our upcoming discussion on signs, meaning and culture and their intersections with the construction of identity, desire and power.

Sut Jhally, "Image Based Culture"
Scott McCloud, Semiotics (from Understanding Comics)
Keith Negus, "Popular Music: Between Celebration and Despair" (from Questioning The Media)

Participatory Culture and Collective Intelligence

Jenkins, "Worship at the Altar of Convergence"

Jenkins, "Spoiling Survivor"

from Convergence Culture

Marshall, "Forms of Interactivity: The Disappearance of the Audience"

Jenkins, "Interactive Audiences? The Collective Intelligence of Media Fans"

Lessig, "Building Blocks: Commons and Layers" + "Commons on the Wires"

from The Future of Ideas

Himanen, "From Netiquette to Nethic"

from The Hacker Ethic

The Social Construction of Race I

This is a short, introductory article on race and the media. As we watch Spike Lee's Bamboozled and discuss the film, Ash Corea's "Racism and the American Way of Media" is a good summary of the issues raised in the film and those that you will be reading about in greater detail with the next group of articles. As a bonus, a classic article by Stuart Hall.

Ash Corea, "Racism and the American Way of Media" from Questioning the Media
Stuart Hall, "What is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture" from Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies




Clip from the 1949 film Hollywood Varieties where actors Glenn Vernon and Edward Ryan apply blackface make-up while on stage and reminisce about 'the good ol' days' --as they say-- of ministrelsy.

Digital Media Cultures Study Guide

Digital Media Cultures Study Guide.

Media, Culture and Society Study Guide

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

 Study Guide for COM 220 here.

Media Consolidation Infographic

An up-to-date infographic on media consolidation. Use this to think through the issues of consumer sovereignty, the illusion of the market as democratic regulator, the media's role in democracy and its social function, etc. as well as the issues raised by Herman and Curran and our discussions in class. 
Study guide tomorrow in class.
 


Source: Frugal dad

Race & Gender 5 Minute University

After the usual wise and profound words of Father Guido which are so perfectly comforting during exam crunch times here is the much agonized for study guide:

Race and Gender

Networks & Emancipatory Uses of the Media

Here are the new readings:
Hans Magnus Enzensberger's "Constituents of a Theory of the Media" is one of the fundamental articles envisioning a new use for media technologies by political movements during the late '60s and '70s, emancipatory tools for political mobilization and social change. Use Marco Tullio Giordana's I Cento Passi and the story of Peppino Impastato and Radio AUT as a way to contextualize and visualize the historical moment in which Enzensberger is writing.

Something to think about in relation to the film is how Peppino Impastato's attempts at carving out a space for communication and direct political action (a public sphere within the confines of a small community dominated by organized crime) is dramatized in the film --from traditional political rallies to 'free radio', after navigating dadaist street theater, pamphleteering, film screenings and be-ins. Think specifically of the characteristics of RadioAut in relation to Enzensberger's article --programming, control, voice, 'mission', etc. Does the 'network' and the resultant digital media culture of today finally deliver on these expectations?

Enzensberger - Constituents of a Theory of the Media

Extra Readings on Old vs. New Media Conceptions:

Michael Crichton - Mediasaurus (1993)

Jack Schaefer - Reflections on Mediasaurus

Audiences and Advertising

Ang, "The Nature of the Audience"
Gandy, "Tracking the Audience"

Kellner, "Advertising and Consumer Culture"

Eileen Meehan on how the media and the rating services blame the victims:
Meehan, Chapter 1: Why TV Is Not Our Fault
Meehan, Chapter 2: Why TV Is Not Our Fault

Article Compilation articles on audience assessment and its problems.

The PBS/Frontline Documentary THE PERSUADERS is here.

Nussbaum, "What Would Tina Fey Do For A SoyJoy?"

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Cinema

"Woman as image, man as bearer of the look"

Otto Preminger's Laura (1944)

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
You can also find it in html format here.

Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976)

The Spirit: Short Writing Assignment #1

As already mentioned in class this first writing assignment revolves around Will Eisner's The Spirit. For this short exercise (3-5 pages) you should first of all read a number of The Spirit stories as they appear in The Best of Spirit anthology which is on reserve in the library (below you will also find four more Spirit stories in digital format --however, as I said in class, you should read this particular text 'the old fashioned way', on paper). 

For your actual writing assignment you should first of all offer a historical contextualization of Eisner's work: where does The Spirit fit into the history of sequential art in general and of comics in particular. Secondly, you should choose two pages of your choice in one of the stories (try to choose the two pages that you find are most interesting in terms of their encapsulation and layout --there are plenty of these in Eisner's work and don't be afraid to move deep into The Best of Spirit anthology to the late 40s material) and simply describe the particularities of The Spirit's stylistic features. Please note that I am not necessarily looking for any particularly deep analysis. What your paper should end up being is a simple description of encapsulation, panel to panel relations, full page layout, use of color, line and text, insets, etc. What this should end up being, more than anything, is an exercise for applying and using comics terminology and an excuse to encourage you to look at an example of comic art closely and attentively.
I'm including here, along with the already mentioned extra Spirit stories, an issue each of DC's Action Comics and Detective Comics so that you can use these as comparative texts to Eisner's technique in The Spirit. Included below is also a two page graphic with the basic components of a comics page and spread identified.
Finally, as a conclusion to you short paper remark what, if anything and in your opinion, makes The Spirit such a standout example of comic art. Enjoy.

Will Eisner, The Spirit
DC's Action Comics #1 (1938)
DC's Detective Comics #27 (1939) -- fixed link
Comics Terminology Graphic 1 & Graphic 2 (from Abel & Madden, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures)

**We will talk about this in class but as you will notice in order to overcome the technical issues we were having with the .cbr extension on the blog I have renamed all linked comic books with a .zip extension. As mentioned in class zip and cbr files are the same thing, the only difference being that the .cbr extension allows your Comic Book Reader application to open and display the images in the zipped folder as a paginated book. All you need to do, after you've downloaded the files to your computer, is change the file extension from .zip to .cbr. Have fun.

Stop the Presses: Big Bird Fired!

Some links and tidbits on the 'debate' following the statements made during the presidential debate by Romney and his 'intention to fire Big Bird'.

Links to the original statement (in context: note that it follows a statement on the need to 'cut the budget'); the response from PBS (official press release + CNN interview and comment by PBS CEO Kerger); an Op-Ed in the NYTimes ("Don't Mess With Big Bird"); a Google image search result page for 'big bird romney'); a couple of 'big bird' meme pages (on Know Your Meme and Quick Meme).

Below is a tweet by Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium in NYC and host of the PBS program NOVA ScienceNOW.

New Media: The Internet as Technology

Jeremy G. Butler, "The Internet and the World Wide Web"
P. David Marshall, "The Internet: The Multi-Media Accessible Universe and the User"
Bolter & Grusin, "The World Wide Web" (from Remediation)

Construction and Performance II: Masculinities

Eminem, Lose Yourself

Jackson Katz, "Advertising and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity: From Eminem to Clinique for Men"
Brian Locke, "Here Come The Judge: The Dancing Itos and the Televisual Construction of the Enemy Asian Male"
Gail Dines, "King Kong and the White Woman: Hustler Magazine and the Demonization of Black Masculinity"

Harold & Kumar