The Open Canvas

Back in my home town there wasn’tt much to do, but chill with your friends and go to Starbucks, so sometimes I’d try to find other things to help live in up a boring night. I don’t know how I got into it, but I started experimenting with spray paint to create art on some leftover cardboard from a past project. Urbandictionary.com defines “bombing” as, “The art of doing any forms of graffiti.” One artist that comes to mind when talking about graffiti is Banksy. Banksy’s, sometimes controversial graffiti, mostly depicts stencil-like people performing different actions, which are mischevious at times. The photo shown below shows how Banksy utilizes the area that his art will cover to produce an miage that comes alive to the viewer.

I would suggest you do a simple google image search for Banksy if you’d like to see more of his work. After looking at images of graffiti online, in books, and practing on cardboard I decided to go bombing myself. I didn’t have any big ideas on what to do so I thought of something simple. I took a piece of cardboard and made a stencil of my name. Then one night I walked to a spot with some friends where I always saw graffiti on the walls and went for it. The result of my actions is seen below.

After a couple of weeks I decided to check up on my name and found that the whole wall had been repainted gray. This leads me to say, “Their will always be people who don’t like your art.”

Recently I’ve been buying and reading comic book story created writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Pérez, called The New Teen Titans. The cover art for these comic books wass always very colorful, which isn’t a surprise since the characters in the story are just as colorful as the costumes they have on. Coming out in the 80’s, the New Teen Titans depicted an array of new characters aside from the original four members: Wonder Girl, Aqualad, Kid Flash, and Robin. The New Teen Titans definitely reflected the era they were created in, as do most comic books, along with the detailed cover art as well as the art within the book the stories brought out problems that only a teenager could experience, which was revisited when Cartoon Network premiered a television show called the Teen Titans. The television show mirrored the idea of creating a teenage problem for the Titans, but the way the Titans were depicted on screen were in a different category than how they were drawn in the comic books. The show, created by Glen Murakami, designed the Teen Titans to fit the era they were created in. The Titans reflected anime, which was already popular in Japan, but rising in popularity in the U.S. To compare the way the Teen Titans looked in the 1980s and the way they looked in the television show would be like comparing a desktop computer and a laptop computer, they look good for the era that they came out in. The comic books are always a good read and the cover art sets the tone for the adventure because of all the things going on in that single page. The television show is great to watch because of the way the emotions of the characters depicted on screen are so much like that of a Japanese anime.

An example of the detail and color shown in the cover art of The New Teen Titans. (On a side note I actually on this comic book)

An example of the TV show and it’s fusion with Japanese anime.

Back when I was a little kid I would buy comic books at the swap meet every time my parents took me there. I always enjoyed looking through the different stacks of comics in search of a comic book that looked like I’d be interested in reading. As I got older I ended up selling all the comics I had in my possession at a garage sale my Aunt was running. I used to think comic books were a good investment because as years past they might be worth more, but I soon realized that it wasn’t really a sure thing. About a year ago I walked into a comic book store with some friends and felt the urge to buy a couple of comic books just for fun and from then on I started collecting comic books again, but not because I thought they might make me some money in the future. I started looking more at the cover art of the comic book and started buying comic books that had a front cover that really popped out. Of course reading the comic book is another thing you should do whether or not it brings down the “price value” of the comic. You don’t want to have never read a comic book you own, it’s like having your hands and never using them for what they’re meant to be used for, comic books are meant to be read. So always read a comic book you own and take a good look at the art as well, but never buy a comic book just because you think it’s a good investment and don’t just buy a comic book and never read it.