Anita Blake

Overall, it was definitely cool to read the Anita Blake graphic novels. I think what I enjoyed more than the actual story itself was the breaking up of reading novels with a different medium, and while I've never been a huge comic book fan, I can still enjoy a good graphic novel every now and then. While Anita didn't live up to my two favorite comic book novels, The Watchmen (everyone's favorite) and Red Son (coolest Superman story by far), it still had some good action, an involved script, and very cool cartooning, despite the impossible-to-avoid male gaze. While I feel it probably does not live up to the series of novels for purist fans, the adaptation seemed to remain fairly faithful, and the books could be enjoyed by just about anyone interested in mild social allegory, anyone looking for good vampire-cut-in-half action, or anyone who who wants a good, female driven storyline.

While briefly discussed in class, one of the things I took from the reading was the recurring theme of penguins on much of Anita's clothing and in her bedroom. It was explained in the comic and more extensively in the novel that Anita was a very big fan of penguins, and as a result, she has penguin merchandise galore. While it could be meaningless and completely arbitrary, I looked at the depictions of penguins as being a representative either of how Anita saw herself, or how she wanted to be. Throughout the book, it is made clear that Anita is very talented, powerful. However, the visual depictions of her tend to cast her in a more vulnerable light, looking innocent and scared fairly often, not to mention it leaves her in situations where she needs the help of men for everything to work out. In scenes where Anita is wearing her penguin garb, the penguin will be cold, stoic, looking strong and unafraid. This is often the way Anita speaks, but it is not always how she appears and acts. In fact, the penguins on her shirts usually appear more tough than Anita in any given scene. As a result, I feel like Anita was intended to be tougher, but the cartoonist fell a bit short of the original author's image, and instead offered the penguin as Anita's true side, or at least what she wishes she could be.

I also found that, with all of the male gaze, there were a surprising amount of homoerotic scenes throughout the work. The more we read into different vampire texts, the more I notice and become interested the idea of using a genre typically used for fear inducing as a vehicle for social commentary or metaphor or allegory, etc. The part of this book that I actually enjoy the most is the flashback scene, when the narration depicts how life as a vampire was before the Supreme Court decision of Addison V. Clarke. To look at it that way, that these people who were once not considered people, and had to deal with upheaval towards gaining rights, that makes the entire idea more relatable and thought provoking, although it obviously is not as powerful as real life social change/progress that has happened.