Alexander Chee muses on his experiences at Amherst College teaching a seminar on graphic novels.
... an Ukiyo-e woodblock print by Kuniyoshi, is one of the pieces of art that led me into my interest in the graphic novel. The visual pun at its center emits a narrative force, a dramatic irony—you are drawn into the story about to happen, the idea that the fox has cast this illusion around it and has not yet been caught by anyone except the artist and the reader. Comics and graphic novels at their best play with this and the other forces a visual pun brings to bear. It’s one of the things a comic or graphic novel can do that prose alone has to play catch-up with—creating in the mind of the reader simultaneous contrasts, the fox as woman as fox as illusion. ...read more
The rest is full of such excellent insights. Be sure to check out the excellent & varied reading list at the end.
And did we mention that his novel
Edinburgh is an eloquent, powerful, and deeply moving read? Here,
read the prologue and you'll see.
People ask me why I singled out Coke, and in some ways I did that because it is such an iconic brand and such a symbol of capitalism, but I think the lessons I drew from investigating Coke are not specific to Coke -- it's not some evil corporation that is somehow worse than all the others. In fact, a lot of the lessons about how and why the company does what it does and how people have ultimately been able to hold Coke accountable are just as applicable to BP or Halliburton or other major corporations. I think of the Coke Machine as in some ways a metaphor for the darker side of corporate capitalism and I hope that my book can be seen as a way of exposing that. ...read more
