Joe Week 2

According to Horricks (2004), how have perceptions of comics as a media changed?

According Horricks (2004), the perceptions of comic have changed when ‘aesthetic grounds’ are taken into ‘serious consideration’.  Comics have always been considered cheap and inferior forms as compared with well recognised literary arts (classical literature and masterpiece paintings).  But with the non-linear innovation as shown in the comics strip, “In the Shadow of No Towers” by Spiegelman (2004), readers’ interaction is drawn in as they read through the non-linearity of panels of picture on their choice of the reading order.  The way the medium each individual author uses to convey exemplifies a kind of narration but not measured with time or space represented in the panels but their thought (a kind of ‘seme me’) – Horricks (2004). 

Through present day media, eg., television series, movies, commercial advertisements, audience are brought into the hyper reality of ‘parallel world” with the “little understood literary genre”.  Comics is an artwork built by authors (artists) through ever advancing IT to present what they wish to convey.

Perceptions of comics have changed from hostility to exclusivity and acceptance.  In the 1950s, anti-comics activities were manifested by parents, teachers and educators in form of open protests, radio broadcast, and  restrictions in school regulations, because the bad effects and influence they imposed on children's thinking and behaviour if their children were allowed unchecked what they read in their leisure hours. Bill Pearson wrote an open letter to Landfall saying, "The comics erode the most fundamental habits of humane, civilized living and .....in the most vulnerable element of our society, our children."  I can still remember that my brother and I received a beating on our behinds from our mother when we were discovered reading comics in our bed with quilt over our heads.


Nowadays, with the development of science and technology and our entire perception toward life, different dynamics in our living style are explicating in ever-changing telecommunication techniques, advancement of graphic arts and gaming machines.  Pearson's worries have disappeared to other media.  Instead, research and criticism on comics transform it as an art, as a framework to incorporate fantasy genre as a part of literature.  It is treated as a sub-creation and world-building process to "make a Secondary world which your mind can enter.  Inside it, .... it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside."

References

Horricks, D. (2004). The Perfect Planet: Comics, games and world-building in Williams, M. (Ed),         Writing at the Edge of the Universe. Christchurch: U of Canterbury Press


Bill Pearson, letter printed in Landfall vol. 9, no. 1, March 1955, pages 95-97