In Class 9/10/13

A genre is a way to classify or categorize stories, wither it be movies, music, books etc. The plot, characters and other elements of the story go into the classification of a genre. The time period also very often plays a role in the type of genres that are created.

The effect of a genre may allow you to stereotype and limit yourself to separate genres. You may not have liked Sci-Fi movies but that doesn’t mean you are going to dislike all Sci-Fi movies.

These movies no longer can just be classified around just one genres, most movies now need two or three because movies can span over so many different genres.

Mystery as a genre has now transformed more into crime solving than mystery. 

Genre evolves with the time and the environment you are living in.

The genres have basic formulas that define the story, this formula is going to have different variables which will alter the movies and progress the genre forward. 

Literature is the object that genre is defining. Genre can be applied to literature as well as movies, music, and many others.

Li'l Abner

For my comic strip I chose to read Li’l Abner, this is a comic that as I was growing up my grandfather would always reference it. I never knew what it was until reading it for this class. I enjoyed reading this comic because very often you could understand the story at first glance. Like all people in this class I am very visual and my mind absorbes information much quicker and clearer when I have a physical image of it in my head. I could read the same sentences multiple times but I will not remember it half as well as I would if there was some sort of visual clue to help me take in the information.

I think comics are a really interesting way to do this, because often times people read to use their own imaginations. Stories are a great way to let your mind run with a story and the images that you create in your head may be drastically different from someone else reading the same story. But with comics the imagery is already there for you. One thing I experimented with while reading this text was to go through and entire page and try to understand the plot without reading the text that goes along with it. Often times I was able to comprehend the basic jist of the story, but sometimes the images were too vague to follow. Without reading the text in some places you could become totally lost in the story, and same with if you removed the images. The comics themselves are very reliant on the imagery. Comics seem to me to be a very dependent art form, without one the other suffers.

This brought up many questions for me about comics in general and the creators of them. If it is just one person would they consider themselves an artist or an author? If there is an author and an artist how do they work in unison to ensure that the comic will be composed in the most ideal manner? Do the authors/artists create the plot then draw the images and then come up with the text or vice versa? I wonder what the process these artists go through is like? When you are creating a piece of work that is so heavily dependent on another medium of information one must be more dominant to guide the other along. Unless Al Capp would draw and write the text simultaneously. I feel like illustrating and writing comics would be a difficult task because you need to balance the two so it is clear wither you like reading them or just browsing them.