Pekar, Harvey; An American Splendor.

Ware, Chris; ‘Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth’.

Short Paper: Can “mundane” be portrayed more successfully in

comics than in any other media?
 
A schematcs
Reactions can be binary too,
Yes bcs
No bcs
 
RESEARCH
Two creators are very distinctive very unique people
Ok?

Cinema can take people to the moon, re-enact gigantic battles, and
take the audience to magical lands and universes. Georges Meliès,
Jean Cocteau, films like “The Thief of Baghdad” and “Battleship
Potemkin” are prime examples of monumental qualities of cinema,
with the world building that takes place on the titanic screen. But
the films of the Lumiere brothers were also about people playing
cards, people in their gardens, colloquial and mundane situations.

Cinema is the place where a light can be shone on the ordinary.

Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, “Life at its least controllable and
most unconscious moments, a jumble of transient, forever dissolving
patterns accessible only to the camera.”

http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2016/15-poetic-films-about-
mundane-subjects/

Nothing happens in this film, or maybe everything happens. 

To some people, a cow is a cow, a quite graceless and unremarkable
animal, and kind of boring as well. To Hassan, his cow is everything,
his possession, his muse, his life, and when the cow dies and the
village tells him that it escaped, he spends his life quietly waiting for
it to come back, and then starts behaving like a cow, until a complete
fusion happens
It shows the way in which we are, in a sense, temporal virgins, always
moving towards a previously unexperienced state of our life, and
Hong Sang-soo captures the delicate wonder that this attitude
toward life brings.

These banal representations align with the mundane experience of

everyday life, and more specifically, in the cases discussed, with
the familiar, unreflexive belonging that is induced through dwelling
and acting in banal kinds of quotidian spaces

indie films,

Street level philosopher

how grounding and small details some of his work was

interpersonal relationships which is a big part of american splendor

work-based

politics –

mundane can be best portrayed in comics because it is very easy to

actualize your ideas and sketch right after an experience, it might
allow a fairly amount of more detail. Since what makes mundane a
worthy read is the successfully observed details from everyday
places where everybody’s just overlooking, requires experiencing the
routine more presently.
The quickness and immediateness of American splendor story-telling
style requires black and white in my opinion because what matters is
the story-telling,

Chris Ware prefers a more artsy, graphic-illustration like style when

compared to Harvey Pekar using images as a simple part of
storytelling in an iconic and pragmatic way. Even though they both
are concerned with the “boring”, unremarkable daily life as a subject
to their expression, they are splitting in an aspect related to
linearity of their timeline. In American Splendor, Harvey Pekar
creates a rather filmable timeline whereas in Jimmy Corrigan, Chris
Ware enriches the reading experience with schemas, family trees,
plans, instructions etc. By doing that he is making the most of comics
as a medium to express his emotions, scars, traumas not merely
leaning on words. Also, this non-linearity allows the reader to grasp
what has been reflected by the writer upon his own true-life
experiences since our own minds also does not work in a linear
fashion in its natural form, either it be remembering or planning, it
hops and jumps all over the place – just like Chris Ware’s way of
telling us his story. To be able to do that one should be very aware
about their own remembering and reflecting path, how their mind’s
mechanism work; that’s what makes Jimmy Corrigan such an
unsettling, startling, to the point piece of artwork.

In other mediums especially in film, the impossible task of breaking

the linearity is often experimented but since the nature of film does
not allow frame to frame (panel to panel) transitions, we as the
audience can witness cuts made between memories in a more
disorganized way at most if desired (like in Memento, 2000) or
transitions from future to past with shots indicating an abnormality
(like in Irreversible, 2002). With many more successful examples in
film, still with the comics medium, artist can play with the timeline
comparably easier. In Jimmy Corrigan, the reader experiences the
mind of a small child, his imagination and delusions with a pinch of
surrealism since not only our mind’s timeline does not tune with the
reality with capital R nor its products always sync with it. For
example, where Jimmy pictures himself as a baby causing her
mother’s death, he’s a very small miniature human being whereas we
can also see him a giant feeding upon the city. This touches of
surrealism does not necessarily indicate a magical realist approach
but without breaking the commonly agreed Reality, it successfully
portrays the mind’s way of functioning.

On the other hand, film, being photographs in motion, might be more

successful in imitating the language of our inner sounds and images
since they are mostly constituted of collections of those perceptions
rearranged.