Comics Off-Page

Hey all,

As Ondrej and I have been working on putting together a (crude) comic of our own for class, I've been thinking a lot about comics and form--specifically, what happens when a comic is liberated from the print medium. Andrew talked in his Here presentation about the mess that came out of the "interactive" e-book version of Here, and Rich showed us that interesting exploratory comic that gave the viewers the agency to rove around the frames.

This short-story comic, "His Face All Red" by Emily Carroll came to mind. Specifically, this page (mild spoiler!), where a character is climbing down into a deep hole, and the panel, rather than being broken into many panels separated by gutter space, just continues on and on as the tunnel does, unbroken, and the character appears at multiple spaces during the descent.

Because this comic was intended to be viewed on a computer screen and not on pages, its axis of interaction for viewers was able to change. We encounter pages laterally, and so the frame at the end of the right page offers suspense--what comes next can't, for the moment, be seen. The reader has to flip the page, literally suspending their involvement in the comic for a brief moment. Here, Carroll still has a page-change in the "next" button, but she also has the option for the comic to spread vertically, not just laterally. In order to see the entirety of the spread, the reader must now scroll, offering suspense both laterally and vertically. This seems so simple, but I was so pleasantly surprised in the experience of this. Carroll's comics were later printed into a book form, Through the Woods, and the effect of this moment in particular, the character descending into the pit, is so much more successful with the surprise of being able to scroll down as he descends, literally descending with him.

So often, I feel like examples of art being taken out of its traditional medium is offered as a failure--what doesn't work, why comics belong on pages and not in e-books with interactive GIFs (still chuckling about that). This was a moment where I felt a screen amplified my experience of the narrative as opposed to detracting from it.

Audience Agency

Hi, all.

After my talk on McGuire's Here, I've been wanting to post a bit more on Randall Munroe's XKCD webcomic. Arya Ponto of Artboiled has linked to a zoomable map of Munroe's comic "Click and Drag." I like Ponto's observation that the latter comic affords more agency to the audience, insofar as the audience can navigate it how they wish. Meaning is generated, in other words, by non-linear navigation and not by sequential storytelling a la panel construction. At the same time, there is less stability in reaching a fixed meaning, as the comic affords many different navigations.

Munroe's work is something I'd like to revisit later, specifically in trying to connect it to essay compositions that controlled by paragraphs and margins. What if we composed an essay at this scale, with plenty of white space between texts? I think Prezi is getting us closer to that non-linear possibility, but I think we can get closer.

Authenticity and Style

Most of the autobiographical comics we've read have used a simple, cartoonish style to depict events.  What seems most important is the story, the words.  The art is more functional, meant as a conduit for understanding the story, rather than as a completely aesthetic object in itself.  I have also been reading Mat Johnson's other graphic novels, each illustrated by a different person, and in some cases even have different inkers. Each style is different, from elaborate blue-wash scenes to angled black faces. When we look at fictional comics, we come to the story with a different expectation and look at it as an aesthetic object.  But when we read an autobiography, we come to it with different expectations of authenticity.

My question is this: how much do we value authenticity, a true story written by the author's hand?
How much do we value authenticity?  And how much does a simplified, cartoonish style help that or hinder it? Lynda Barry in particular emphasizes the auto*fictional*ography-ness of her work.  Yet, in the other book I read of hers, Syllabus, she has a similar style to this book.  There is an authenticity to her "voice" as a comic book writer, but she also had others design parts of the book. How much do we rely on the truth of the art over the words, if at all. How would we take an autobiography whose art was made by another hand? How much leeway do we give "truth" when we know that a particular cartoonish picture could not possibly be exactly how it was in the memory? In print prose, we place a large amount of emphasis on the distinction between fiction and nonfiction.  Is there something intrinsic about comics that makes the distinction less important?  Or does the way comics is marketed highlight the fuzzy boundary inherent in all art?

Caricature and narrators

Through the course of this semester, we have seen characters depictions that range from realistic to cartoonish on varied points on Scott McClouds depiction pyramid. "Caricature" is often used interchangeably with "cartoonish" to mean features exaggerated or masked from real life.  However, a drawing style like that in Persepolis allows characters to be abstracted, certain features like the eyes exaggerated, without falling into the trap of caricature, exaggerating certain features to be intentionally ugly or off-putting. In Arab of the Futures, many but not all of the characters were drawn as caricature, intentionally exaggerating characters' least flattering features, often coinciding with the characters that reader is intended to sympathize with the least. The implicit case was made in the book that beauty and ugliness correspond to goodness and badness. A manipulative move, or simply another of the comic writer's tools?  In this case, the author, the autobiographical narrator came off as unreliable, someone whose perspective was so skewed that they could not tell an impartial or an honest story.

Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons uses a caricature style to tell its short stories, but unlike in Arab of the Future, the caricature style served to make Lynda a more reliable narrator. specifically because the caricature is used for self-deprecation. The truths (fictional truths?) in the book were confessional, often painted her in a bad light, but that was exactly what made the stories affecting. Instead of making the case that beauty equals goodness and ugliness equals badness, the ugliness seemed just a fact of normal existence.  In fact, as the reader is aware of Lynda the artist who penned the stories, the more caricature she drew her younger self, the better it made her the artist seem more reliable, trustworthy, and a better person.  Her regret over her actions seemed matched with the way she depicted herself on the page.

Caricature can be used to manipulate the way the reader feels about the event on the page.  When the caricature is used to distort a sense of reality in a way that paints the narrator in a more positive light, particularly in work of an autobiographical nature, where we are aware of the artist/writer as a person or character in themselves, it gives us the impression that the narrator is unreliable. However, when it's used for self-deprecating purposes and the subject matter matches it, it can boost the reliability and likability of the narrator.

Collage and Social Change in Lynda Barry’s One-Hundred Demons

Of all the works we’ve read this semester, Lynda Barry’s One-Hundred Demons seems the most concerned with reaching out to its audience. The introduction with its labeled drawing of Berry’s studio, the collage-style title pages to each chapter, the final section explaining how readers might go about painting their own demons, all of these things made this feel like a bit of a textbook or how-to manual, which is strange considering that most of this book is an intensely personal account of one woman’s experiences. Nonetheless, I often felt that Barry was trying to speak to each of us personally, suggesting that art is a mechanism that can help people, and positioning the book as a kind of method for social change.

 

Style plays a huge part in this. Barry insists on texture throughout the book, emphasizing collage, glitter, folded paper, etc. Even though the pages of this book are flat, the texture of the artwork is so vivid that it’s impossible not to be aware of it. Even the sweeping lines of her ink stone method have a sense of tactility to them. The embellishments of the title pages feel almost like gifts, like handmade cards given to the reader, and this imbues the chapters themselves with a sense of intimacy, as if they were part of a personal letter.

 

The result of this approach was that, for me, I felt a strange sense of gratitude while reading this book. Also, as when receiving a letter from a friend, I did feel a sense of obligation: I felt like I should write back. If we take the final section at face value, this is exactly what Barry wants: for her readers to pick up their own brushes and to write back. I’m left, though, with a few questions: 1). Does the focus on audience cloak Barry’s own life story? In other words, does it operate as a kind of misdirection? 2). I think we are meant to infer that Barry has benefited from this project, but in what ways? If we all go out and pick up our own brushes, do we have a clear sense of how the world will change, at least from Barry’s perspective? 3). To what degree is this approach gendered, and does that influence the ways that we interpret its message?

Overall, the place audience occupies in this work, and the ways in which the emphasis on texture brings process to the forefront suggest some interesting things regarding the potential for graphic narratives to impact wider social change.

Here -- Further Connections

While doing research on Here, I came across a number of artists involved in the tradition of the sort of 'z-index' movement I discussed in my presentation. In my handout, I focused primarily on early illustration work from Edward Hopper. I wanted to use this blog post to connect you to other artists and works that I found speaking to the way McGuire manipulates time.


First, I noted Chris Ware and his review of Richard McGuire's work. I found it interesting to dig into Ware's own comic style to see how, decades later, his work continued to shape temporal narratives. Below, a page from Ware's Big Tex.

Here's another from Ware from The Big Book of Jokes Vol. II. In both instances, we can see a held perspective that creates drama between instances of time and paradoxically seem to evoke a sort of timeless narrative.

If you're like me, you might not readily associate Norman Rockwell with artists like McGuire or Ware. But in my research, I was amazed at the similar use of windows in his work and the attention he draws between domestic scenes and large timescales. Below, a shadow puppet gag projects an iconic figure on the wall. The children (and viewer) are forced to experience a playful scene alongside a reach back in time to a sort of cave and fire presentation. Next, a Rockwell painting from 1921 that continues Hopper's framing techniques.

Finally, mostly because I'm still just blown away by the resonance that I feel from Hopper to McGuire, I wanted to include a few more from Hopper that I wasn't able to cover in the presentation:

Summer Interior (1909)

Room in Brooklyn (1932)

Rooms by the Sea (1951)

Self-referentiality in "One Hundred Demons" and beyond...

After I finished reading One Hundred Demons a few days ago, one question remained on my mind: Why were all the memoirs or autobiographically-based graphic novels we've read this semester so self-referential? I don't see this happening nearly that often in memoirs, autobiographies and poems, so what is it about the medium of the comic, or the graphic novel to be more precise, that makes it so obsessed with the meta? The answer has to be at least in part in the visual nature of the comic. Is it the act of gazing at yourself (however far in the past) while simultaneously drawing yourself? Or do the comic medium's textual conventions--the need to not only draw yourself but also give your old self a moment by moment voice-over--play an equally important part in inviting self-reference?

In One Hundred Demons, the meta-layer struck me as particularly interesting. The entire book is the result of a project that is all about introspection and creating for the creation's sake (not publication)--but at the same time, the book has a clear massage by the end: You can do this too! "Come on! Don't you want to try it? Paint your demon." It's a self-help book & memoir at the same time. Of course, there are other, smaller-scale meta moments in One Hundred Demons. Page 199: "The situation looks hopeless. But suddenly something happens that turns it around. The bad guy is vanquished. The good guy wins. It's called a happy ending. There are nine million stories like this. Why do we tell them?" And what's the arc of One Hundred Demons if not that? What about the chapter, if it be called a chapter, called "Classifieds" that explains why the author is not composing in more traditional medium? Or the note on page 18: "Sounds better in Tagalog"? Or page 22: "What did he mean when he said i was not-in-the-moment enough?" Or the dogs description on page 174: Ooola as "observant, moody, socially unpredictable (aka 'artistic')" (notice the quotation marks of irony)? (Sure, some are more subtle than others).

Do you recall the meta-layers, the breaking of the fourth wall, the self-reference in the other memoirs we read this semester? In Maus, Fun Home, Stitches, The Arab of the Future, The Photographer?

Why does it happen so often? I'll just leave that here.

"Here" criticism

I found a pretty odd bit of criticism for Here online that you all might enjoy and/or have some commentative banter in reaction to. For those of you who don't know yet, Here was originally a six page experimental comic published in the New Yorker. Here's what it looked like. The criticism pasted below is largely a complaint about the conversion from this style into the book we're holding. What do you think of this reaction to the comic?

How a Legendary Comic Called "Here" Became an Inferior Graphic Novel Called Here

Richard McGuire Expanded His Classic and Made It Only Okay

by Paul Constant

Originally published in 1989, Richard McGuire's six-page black-and-white comic "Here" offered a definitive demonstration of comics' secret weapon—the ability to transcend time. The reader's perspective in "Here" focused on a single corner of a single house in a series of nested panels, each displaying the same location in a different year: a dead mouse in a trap in 1999, an old man in 1986, and a stegosaurus in "100,650,010 BC." Time is the narrative device that unlocks the significance of the otherwise pedestrian place. "Here" turned out to be six of the most influential pages in comics history, heavily influencing the work of world-class cartoonists like Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Lynda Barry.

Now, a quarter-century later, McGuire has published a book-length version of "Here," a full-color, 300-page expansion of his original story. This Here (Pantheon Books, $35) is a beautiful book with some interesting changes to the adaptation—McGuire has blown each "panel" up to the size of two pages, making the "corner" of the room into the fold between the pages. All the extra space allows McGuire to examine many other time periods, to embed longer narratives within the framework of the story, and to bring the rhythm of an epic novel to his once-brief experiment.

Unfortunately, Here is inferior to "Here" in almost every way. Blowing each panel up to two pages robs the story of its energy, and deprives the piece of the very time manipulation that made it so significant to begin with. In "Here," a reader could be an omniscient time traveler, focusing on a single panel while still seeing forward and backward slices of narrative out of the corner of her eye. Here makes you turn a page to see what comes next, or what came before. Any book can do that.


 http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/how-a-legendary-comic-called-here-became-an-inferior-graphic-novel-called-here/Content?oid=21189363

The Scales of Time and Place in "Here"

As writers and readers of literature, we've come to know time and place as two fundamental building blocks of narrative. And although there isn't a rule of narrative without an exception or at least one attempt to defy that rule (a whole novel taking place in a single second, poems and novels going backward in time, place-less narratives (?)), without time and place, narrative ceases to exist, or if not cease, then it must retreat and live in the margins to make space for and privilege something else (sound, image, word-play, collage) to carry a piece of language art through.

I found the idea of time and place and their role in narrative, or rather the lack of one, in Here particularly interesting. On one hand, time and place stand at the very core of the book, though both on very different scales. Place, the very project of Here, does not change (meaning, we do not move from one place to another)--the book points its lens at one specific plot of land (and especially one specific living room) for the entirety of its length. In this way, the land and the house become a theatrical stage. What does change is time. Time, in Here, moves backward and forward, instantaneously (sometimes within the same spread, we become privy to windows leading into several different times of history and future at once), and on a grand scale. Its range spans from 3,000,500,000 BCE to 2213. The single place, then, naturally changes as time passes.

What intrigued me was the seeming lack of narrative in the book (I'm sure a conscious choice on McGuire's part--I don't want to get into themes here), despite the strong sense of both time and place. Aren't we grounded? Doesn't time pass? Aren't those two things the main prerequisites for narrative to happen? So why does so little seem to happen? Of course, the dialogue is minimal and the action is very minimal--the comic works almost as a series of overlaid and stylized photographs--but that can't be it. What I think it is...it is as if there was a certain scale and distribution of time and place within the narratives of Western society that we have been conditioned to throughout its history of storytelling (by plays, movies, other books), and anything outside of those limits seems suspect.

Of course there's plenty of narrative in Here, but because it's not on a scale we're used to, we are likely to question it. We might be only slightly uncomfortable when the scale is out of proportion to what we're used either on the plane of time (I'm thinking the short story "Bullet in the Brain") or on the plane of place (I'm thinking the movie Dogville). But what happens when the scales of time and place are both relative extremes? Do they still work together or do they begin to hinder each other? And what happens to narrative then, and why? These are some questions I am, thanks to Here, still working through.

Abstracts in Sequence: Following Redniss' Radioactive Process

“I don’t think like a comic book artist or graphic novelist, I can’t draw the same character over in sequential panels. I’m really interested in abstraction—I think I’m letting myself inch towards it.”

-- Lauren Redniss, interviewed by BOMB Magazine.

    Visual biography. Illustrated reportage. Graphic story. Lauren Redniss’ work Radioactive, centered on the private lives and innovations of scientists Marie and Pierre Curie, tends to elude the label of “comics,” whether due to critical reviews or Redniss’ comments, such as the one above. As explained in a Washington Post story:

It’s a strange book — it’s not a graphic novel,” says Redniss, who is also the author of 2006’s “Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies.” “It’s a combination of drawings and a type of print called ‘cyanotypes’ and the written word in which all the different elements combine to tell a story that could not be told by any one element alone.”

    On the one hand, we ought to respect Redniss’ definition of the project––a “strange” mix of words and abstract images that amount to a complex, visual biography. By “strange,” she might be referring to the lack of panels and gutters that parse out her compositions. On the other hand, we ought to enrich her definition by looking at comics journalism and drawing on comics theory a la McCloud. Even if Redniss’ work isn’t a comic, per se, it evokes techniques familiar to the form. So, if we work with Redniss’ definition, and we put it in conversation with comics examples, then we might end up labeling Radioactive as sequential abstraction.

    Radioactive, overall, isn’t a clean work of art. As an art form, many comics are clean because they are told in sequential panels; a clean comic, that is, is easy to follow. Reflecting the chaos and glow of the Curies’ productive lives, Radioactive features many long passages of written words often juxtaposed with abstract images, both of which are conveyed on cyanotype printing. While Redniss does not use panels, she tells the book in a chronological order, using images and words to chronicle the Curies’ lives. Sequences exist, albeit in a way that departs from many comics. In fact, Radioactive is largely powered by what McCloud deems “scene to scene,” insofar as Redniss pauses at critical moments in Curies’ scientific careers and private lives; her written words, complemented by drawings, help us understand where we are in time. One example, among many others, is her illustration on page 72, in which she describes the day that Marie defends her thesis and Pierre “unveiled a small cylinder of radium for his guests,” the final line guiding the reader to an illustrated cylinder and hand. What follows on page 73 is another hand, only that one contains a letter on Curie’s Nobel nominations. Thus, time continues through text-image compositions.

    It’s a wonder if Redniss’ work would fall under comics journalism. A quick glance at Symbolia magazine, which has done great work in elevating comics journalism, shows composers experimenting with panels, texts and illustration styles in the name of reportage. In a way, the reportage gives way to art. The same holds true for Redniss; Radioactive drew energy from the Curie archives emanating from the Pantheon. Redniss, then, reported her finds through abstract compositions. Perhaps Radioactive is journalism in the abstract, glowing with comics techniques.

"On Photography" and other links

Hi guys,

I want to share with you a couple links to some of the pieces that I worked with to create my presentation for The Photographer. For one thing, I think these articles and books are super interesting, and I also hope they may be useful to those of you who'd like to get a better-mediated look into some of the issues and ideas regarding photography and photography+comics I discussed yesterday, whether out of personal curiosity, for your final projects, or as a way of transition to Radioactive, which also includes some photographs.

First, my personal favorite...here's Susan Sontag's condensed look "On Photography" (from a textbook) and here's the full book. Sontag really made me rethink a lot of my presumptions about photography and I would recommend her to anyone.

In class we mentioned and read excerpts from Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. So I'm linking the full book here. It's a bit denser than Sontag, but equally fantastic and the writing's more beautiful. What's more, for the fans of Richard Howard, he did the translation of this version of the book.

For those interested in lynching photographs and the like, here's the link to "Behold the Tears: Photography as Colonial Witness," a great article that deals with the nuances of how photography can work both as a colonizer's tool and a way to reclaim the past for the oppressed. (To access this one, you might have to log in with your UC Library access code),

And last but not least, here's the other Nancy Pedri article (the one we didn't read for class), "When Photographs Aren't Quite Enough: Reflections on Photography and Cartooning in Le Photographe," that deals with the marriage of photography and comics in The Photographer specifically.

Have a great AWP, if you're going, or a great week without us writers if you aren't!

Cheers,

Ondrej

Media Mixing and Memory in The Photographer

The graphic work The Photographer mixes Didier Lefèvre’s photographs and Emmanuel Guibert’s illustrations in a sequence that chronicles Lefèvre’s humanitarian mission with Doctors without Borders in Afghanistan amid the Soviet-Afghan War. For this post, I’m thinking about what’s at stake when a graphic narrative is conveyed through mixed media. Many graphic narratives appear in print media (e.g., shiny paper) that remediates compositions in pencils, inks, paints, type and more. The Photographer stands out because, unlike many graphic narratives, it refuses the comics tradition of sticking to one style that emerges from an artist’s media. Put differently, by integrating documentary photography with illustrations, The Photographer is a collaborative project both in process and on paper, in a way that challenges long-held traditions of the comics form. In rhetorical terms, the book’s mix of image styles, carefully arranged in a way that respects Lefèvre’s trade and Guibert’s documentation of his life, makes the book’s delivery noteworthy. So, I'll offer that at stake are theories of comics as well as the credibility of the collaborators, whose work relies on archival documents and Lefèvre’s memory.

The interplay of photography and illustrations in The Photographer warrants a return to Scott McCloud’s oft-cited definition of comics: "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or to produce and aesthetic response in the viewer”. I italicize the “ands” above because they speak to the image mixing of The Photographer. If I place the book in McCloud’s picture plane, Lefèvre’s photographs are located in the “Reality” corner, whereas Guibert’s illustrations, I’ll guess, are located somewhere between “Reality” and “Language.” But here’s the rub: The Photographer is “Reality.” Lefèvre’s photographs are from his camera rolls used in Afghanistan, and Guibert’s illustrations were created in response to Lefèvre’s recollections of his journey. That said, I could be swayed toward the idea that Guibert’s illustrations tighten the looseness of Lefèvre’s memory, given that the book was composed more than 10 years after Lefèvre’s trip (The Photographer 262).

Noting that Guibert completed The Photographer shortly after Lefèvre passed away, I’m left wondering who deserves more credit for composing the book. I assign priority to Lefèvre because without his photography and recollections we wouldn’t have the book (at least in this form). One of Guibert’s invention strategies was to examine Lefèvre’s materials and conduct interviews, methods that shaped his illustration style. In 2009 interview with Newsrama, Guibert said the project was borne from two friends attempting to convey one lived experience. “That’s what I like about those stories made with friends: try to experiment so, if two persons really listen to each other, mutual comprehension turns polyphony into some sort of single melody.” Guibert, then, shouldn’t be viewed as Lefèvre’s lesser than collaborator. He was responsible for filling in the gaps between Lefèvre’s photographs, arranging the book in a way that brought narrative closure to the photographer’s timeline.

First-Person Gaming and The Photographer

Recently, I’ve been playing Campo Santo’s February 2016 release, Firewatch, a first-person exploration-based video game set in the Wyoming wilderness in the 1980s. I’m interested in approaches to narrative in video games, particularly in the techniques that games use to immerse and involve players in action, and some of the approaches used in Firewatch seem similar to those used in Guibert, Lefevre, and Lemercier’s The Photographer. The more that I think about it, video games and comics have significant elements in common, and some of those commonalities may help to explain why graphic formats are so effective at challenging mass-media stereotypes and assumptions.

For those that aren’t familiar with the game, in Firewatch, players experience the world through the perspective of Henry, a middle-aged man who has begun a job as a firewatch in a Wyoming state park as a way of escaping tragic elements of his life. Most of the game is spent guiding Henry through the park as he investigates a series of mysterious happenings, as well as selecting his walkie-talkie responses to his colleague, Delilah. Although players occasionally catch a glimpse of Henry’s hands and lower body, for most of the game, “Henry” is simply a role that the player inhabits, an avatar that stands in for the player’s own consciousness and presence in the game.

The sense of inhabiting an avatar is evoked extensively, too, in The Photographer through the use of photographs. Most of the photographs included the book are offered without explanation, and readers are expected to look closely and to make sense of what is being shown, to determine meaning without extensive guidance. At the same time, Didier’s representation in the rest of the book, gives a strong sense of his character, and while looking at the photographs it is difficult to avoid the sense of seeing through another’s eyes, of inhabiting another person and attempting to understand his thoughts. Often, while reading The Photographer, I felt that I was not only expected to create my own meaning for the photographs, but that I was also trying to puzzle out what these photographs meant for Didier, to develop a close understanding of his psychology and perspective.

This kind of reading promotes a strong sense of reader participation, the feeling that the reader is also, to a degree, present in the text, and closely aligned with the characters. Many games such as Firewatch use choice to create a similar effect. In selecting Henry’s actions (Will he respond flirtatiously to Delilah’s advances or will he be more standoffish? Which trail will he take on his trip to the lake?), the reader effectively becomes implicated in Henry’s story, and intricately involved in the world. Similarly, by asking readers to create meaning and by allowing them to make basic small choices while reading (Should I look at the images first or read the text? Do I examine the photo outlined in grease pencil before the others?), The Photographer, (and many other graphic narratives), involves the reader in the process of storytelling in a way that can immerse readers more deeply in the world than traditional text and that results in a deeper engagement with and connection to the subject.

A common stereotype of video games is that they distract players from the physical world in a way that can be harmful, by limiting physical activity, for example, or by inhibiting social connection. But what about the ways that gaming can encourage people to become intimately and empathetically involved with subjects that they might not encounter otherwise? It’s difficult not to be astounded by the natural beauty of the world in Firewatch, in a way that, I think, encourages players to pay attention and be moved by natural beauty in the real world. Similar approaches in graphic narratives can result in the same effect. By involving readers in the act of storytelling, as The Photographer does by encouraging readers to see the world through Didier’s eyes, and as many comics do by asking readers to make choices and to decipher the visual messages at work, graphic narratives may be uniquely capable of increasing empathy and altering perspectives in the same way that games are, by creating a deep sense of connection to and involvement with the subject of the narrative.

Literacy Sponsors in Arab of the Future and Beyond

By Rich Shivener

For this post, I’ll spend some time working through the idea of “literacy sponsors” and how such an idea integrates well with this week’s readings. By literacy sponsors, I mean “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy––and gain advantage by it in some way” (166), as explained by Deborah Brandt in her 1998 article “Sponsors of Literacy”. Enable, support, regulate, suppress––I want to run with these terms because they illuminate passages in Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future in addition to al-Saadi’s article on the Arab comics movement. I’ll give most of my attention to moments when enablement and suppression, regulation and support (if there are such lines, that is) converge.

In Arab of the Future, Sattouf draws critical scenes of his childhood from 1978-1984. Among those scenes, Riad’s father serves as a sponsor of literacy, largely because his literacies are sponsored––in varying ways––by a university and/or a government. In fact, I’m drawn to pages 14-15, a series of panels that depict Riad’s father reading Gaddafi’s widespread “Green Book”. Sattouf’s omniscient captions contextualize his father’s reading, suggesting that the the leader encourages reading but regulates it in a way that fits with his vision and beliefs; such a suggestion has weight when Sattouf’s depicts Gaddafi’s regulation of television as well as the national anthem (12, 17). In and outside the pages, views conflicting with Gaffadi are suppressed. That is, Sattouf’s panel don’t work against his father but form of portrait a man whose academic literacies were enabled by a dictatorship, who then expected reciprocity in terms of similar literacy sponsorship and political ideology. Allow me to connect the former point with a passage from Brandt’s article: “Sponsors enable and hinder literacy activity, often forcing the formation of new literacy requirements while decertifying older ones” (179). This is say: Literacies of capitalism would not be televised in Libya.

Thinking more literacy sponsorship, I’m also drawn to panels in which Riad and his father are discussing/practicing literacies.. The panels depicting the two drawing cars is key to showing that Riad’s father holds strong opinions, whether about drawing or language practices in the Syria. Illustrating his father often, Sattouf is effective in showing the tension between Riad’s French literacy sponsors and those expected of his father in the Middle East. In fact, I’ll hold the position that Arab of the Future's narrative arc is bound up by literacy scenes that shape little Riad. I like that Chapter 4 raises the stakes for Riad, insofar as his father is visibly irritated by Riad’s Arabic practices (148). It’s a scene that has me wondering when and how Riad will navigate his literacy worlds.

Speaking of world literacies, I had a chance to check out al-Saadi’s article on the Arab comics movement, and I have a few reactions. On the one hand, I admire that the administrators and contributors of arabcomics.net are committed to recovering historical comics from the Arab world, and I also admire their firm stance on translating new works (e.g., DC Comics). Comics literacy emerges from access (i.e., the web) and translators are supported by the community. On the other hand, it appears that the administrators aren’t interested in those who just want to visit the site. Take this passage from al-Saadi’s article: “‘If someone is a member and hasn’t written a post or commented on a topic, we remove them,’ he emphasized. ‘It’s not about having 5,000 users who aren’t active; we’d prefer a hundred active users.’”. The argument could be made that arabcomics.net is at once making a good-faith effort to promote Arab comics while at the same time suppressing it from the Arab world at large. Perhaps in class we can discuss the legal and ethical implications of such a site.

"Drawing Blood"

"Drawing Blood" from The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/drawing-blood

One thing that struck me about the critical discussion surrounding The Arab of the Future was a common praise of Sattouf ‘telling it like it is,’ which largely gets its license from choices in form and narration: we’re offered a memoir that hangs tightly to a child narrator’s experience. This profile might not dig deeply into global politics, comic history, or even Sattouf’s trajectory as an artist, but it does provide an interesting context and insights into process. 

I was drawn to think about the way that point of view both implicates and exonerates an artist as their work enters a broader conversation. The article explains that Sattouf “read no histories of Syria, barely looked at family photographs, and imposed a rule on himself: never to stray from his childhood perspective, and to write only about what he knew at the time.” His production focuses on personal memory and experience; Sattouf doesn’t want to let his adult self swoop in and shape the narrative. 

Yet it would be a kind of authorial wink to suggest that a book doesn’t make the case for a way to perceive the world-- not just for a child in trauma, but for the adults learning about global politics through it. For better or worse, these authorial choices (I’ve focused on POV, but we could also discuss color, dialogue, and the temporal structure) have the potential to remove the author from certain kinds of culpability. As we see in this New Yorker article, this framing can be interpreted as a pure gesture: “Subhi Hadidi, a leftist member of the opposition who fled Syria in the late eighties told me, ‘Sattouf is faithful to what he sees, and he doesn’t beautify reality.’” I’d be curious to hear how others interpret the stance of the author, the statement of this book’s narration, and how its meaning changes as it’s read by diverse audiences.

Permeable Boundaries in The Arab of the Future

For me, one of the most striking features of The Arab of the Future is its portrayal of the permeable boundaries between countries and cultures. Abdel-Razak seems to have immense freedom of movement in the narrative: he leaves Syria to study in Paris, meeting and marrying Clementine while there; he is offered a professorship at Oxford; and he moves his family from France to Libya, back to France, and then to Syria. Despite the one moment of uncertainty with Syrian customs on pages 68-69, the Sattouf family appears to have few restrictions placed upon their international and intra-national travels. A prime example of this freedom of movement is when the Sattouf’s visit the Isle of Jersey to collect Abdel-Razak’s salary from his time teaching in Libya (152-153). Not only does this show the international exchange of money at play behind-the-scenes of the narrative, but it also highlights the scope of the international movement of the Sattouf family (work in Libya leads to money in Jersey which leads to the prospects of a new home in Syria). Finally, alongside of the immediate Sattouf family, their extended family also enjoys freedom of movement, as family members visit one another from country to country.

In addition to physical movement, cultural boundaries also appear quite permeable. Abdel-Razak speaks French and Arabic, and it is likely that Clementine learns to speak and read Arabic to some degree as well. Also, Clementine’s short tenure as a French language radio newscaster in Libya and her purchase of Paris Match in Syria suggests that she is not the only French speaker in either country. Abdel-Razak listens to Radio Monte Carlo in France as well as in Libya; he enjoys eating “toutes” in both Libya and Syria; and the Libyan government supplies the Canadian drink Tang as a part of its food rations. Finally, the children in both France and Syria seem equally fascinated with vulgar language. While there are important cultural distinctions between each of the countries within the narrative, there nevertheless seems to be many similarities.

On the one hand, the narrative’s emphasis on permeable international boundaries does have its limitations, which is visually suggested by the different colors washed over scenes taking place in each locale. While some movement and interactions may be permitted, complex and significant distinctions persist, and they cannot be overlooked. On the other hand, the permeable boundaries provide an important perspective on the openness of Levant and North African countries with their European neighbors. Unlike the Iron Curtain which forcefully limited physical and cultural interaction between Soviet and NATO countries, the boundaries between Syria, France, and Libya appear much less restrictive. Whereas certain Arabic countries are often portrayed to Westerners as closed-off to the rest of the world, as insulated and wary of letting their citizens travel to or learn about European societies, The Arab of the Future tells a different narrative. Instead, it suggests that people in Syria and Libya, if they have the financial and educational means to do so, can indeed experience European culture, and they have the freedom to emigrate. Therefore, the myriad motivating forces behind expatriate return to these countries, rather than their isolation and distinction from Europe, appears to drive Abdel-Razak’s continual movement back to Syria.

Obscurity and the Archive in King

I don't know about the rest of you, but I found Ho Che Anderson's King just as difficult, if not more so, to read than Hernandez's Human Diastrophism--and for similar reasons. It seems like Anderson makes the history he is relating in his graphic novel purposefully obscure, to illustrate, perhaps, how difficult it is to re-access those major historical moments that deal with major figures, figures who have been designed in the media as heroes. Though his project seems interested in getting a "real" picture of who Martin Luther King, Jr. was as a man, the man behind the myth, he exposes the layers of mythology and artifice that shape not only King in the press and in history books, but shaped King himself through pressure and public expectation.

As Michael Chaney notes in his article "Drawing on History in Recent African American Graphic Novels," "The first two thirds of King demonstrate a noir style of chiaroscuro and high contrast lighting" (181), a fact that made determining which character was speaking very difficult--because not only are the pictures all in black and white, as well as the words, many of the characters are drawn to look very similar; additionally, Anderson suspends the revelation of what King looks like for nearly twenty pages, so we do not know exactly how he is going to be depicted. On top of these factors, scenes do not clearly open and close--often scenes end abruptly, mid-sentence, and begin before the Time and Place tags mark them. I am very curious to know what the individual issues of King looked like, where they made their narrative breaks, because trying to follow along in the hefty, convoluted, fragmented story line was challenging.

Of course, this changes after King and his compatriots organize and perform their march on Washington, DC, and King makes his dramatic "I Have a Dream" speech--the coloring of the pages and the thought bubbles, colored according to who is speaking, suddenly makes the story legible. Chaney agrees that "This creates a sudden easiness in matching speakers with dialogue, whereas earlier textually-dense sections of the book tended to be more difficult in this respect" (181). This suggests that the "I Have a Dream" speech is meant to be a kind of turning point for King, or for us as readers--perhaps things were more closely recorded historically after that moment, or perhaps making the speech solidifies King as a kind of mythological hero whose individuality is suddenly the most important thing--as opposed to being one man among many who are working to make a difference.

The fragmented nature of the narrative is further complicated pictorially by the inclusion of historical photographs worked in as sequential art , and verbally by the many different voices that interrupt and comment upon the larger historical narrative. At times the photographs show different perspectives, or add a historical, realistic layer to the story, and at other times they become very unsettling and confusing (I am thinking of the image of the two naked women inserted in the the narrative when the group is discussing whether or not they ought to recruit children to march [116]); and the different narrators, the "Witnesses," the newspaper articles, the history books, the news anchors, etc., all help to show a fuller picture of reactions and perspectives on King and his efforts, but because they are not clearly marked, sometimes it is very confusing as to who is speaking, or how they are related to the events (190, 198). Overall, King seems to be purposefully obscuring access to its main character even in its efforts to expose a truer image of a man who has been mythologized for fifty years. The truth may not be accessible, because not only did the mythology shape the way we as students, generations later, learn and think about King and his efforts for Civil Rights, but, Anderson suggests, the mythology shaped the way King thought about himself, and the way he behaved.

Heroes and Villains

In a 2006 interview with The Believer, Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic novel Persepolis, discusses her attempt in her portrayal of Iran to humanize and complicate the common Western stereotypes of Iran, which George W. Bush had recently dubbed a member of the “Axis of evil.” In discussing her work, Satrapi says, “Today, the description of the world is always reduced to yes or no, black or white. Superficial stories. Superhero stories. One side is the good one. The other one is evil…[but] the world is not about Batman and Robin fighting the Joker; things are more complicated than that. And nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.” It’s interesting that Satrapi refers specifically to superhero stories in her response, since this genre of story is intricately linked with comics, her chosen medium. In a sense, Satrapi seems to be encouraging readers to question their pre-conceived notions of graphic narratives overall, and to examine assumptions and stereotypes associated with the format.

It’s interesting to consider some of the works we’ve examined this semester with an eye to their representations of “good” and “evil.” In Stitches, for example, David Small clearly positions himself as a hero, a small child victimized by the inscrutable and cruel whims of his terrible family, who manages, in the end, to overcome the wrongs done to him (even, problematically, the genetic “wrongs” of inherited mental illness). Although Small has the opportunity to complicate the portrayal of “evil” in his book by considering the impact of mental illness on his family, or his mother’s unexpressed homosexuality, he largely glosses over these issues. And his mother’s deathbed tears are similar to the punishments doled out to villains at the end of many superhero stories in that they represent, presumably, her awareness of the wrongs she has committed along with her guilt and regret.

Gilbert Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism presents a more complex portrayal of “good” and “evil,” although, on the surface, the story follows a traditional crime narrative format, as the citizens of Palomar try to solve a cruel series of murders. Although crime stories often rely on similar didactic representations of right and wrong, Hernadez complicates this expectation in several ways. While Tomaso’s motives for killing are not completely clear, the coincidence of his murders with the sudden onslaught of aggressive monkeys, who are killed by the townspeople seemingly without concern, suggests a kind of animalism at work in human nature, implying that murder may even be an aspect of humanity. Characters such as Doralis and Humberto mimic or resemble monkeys at various times in the story, further complicating the line between human and animal. Even the town sheriff accidentally shoots Casimira while killing monkeys, illustrating that even the act of murder (or protection) might not be easily classified as villainous or heroic.

Mat Johnson engages most overtly with superhero tropes in Incognegro, a story which relies heavily on action sequences and suspense, and centers on several characters who are undercover in some way, who are not what they seem on the surface. Johnson’s work highlights the fluidity of identity, as well as the arbitrary ways that external expressions of race and gender can have a profound influence on the circumstances of a person’s life. Johnson’s work presents a question that is as equally important today as it was in the time depicted in the novel: How is it that two twins, similar in appearance except that one appears more “white” than the other, can live such vastly different lives and have such varied access to safety? Johnson’s use of the superhero trope offers an insight into the ways in which expression through the arts such as writing and drawing is itself a kind of activism. If identity is fluid, as Johnson suggests, then those who shape perceptions of identity wield incredible power. In an act of justice at the end of the book, Zane publishes a photograph, which compels the citizens to take action against the KKK member responsible for killing his friend. In the eyes of the populace, the man’s true identity is subsumed immediately and completely in the photograph. The public, in this case, is clearly made up of people, who as Satrapi says, “find easy answers to complicated questions.” And in a world of such people, the ability to influence and shape perception is perhaps the most formidable superpower of all.

Article on Lynching Photography

While working on my presentation on Incognegro for Monday, I came across a very informative and disturbing article on lynching photography. Many elements of the article speak to the issues discussed in both the graphic novel and Jen's article. Since I cannot attach the file to this post, here is the bibliographic information to help you find it:

Wood, Marcus. "Valency and Abjection in the Lynching Postcard: A Test Case in the Reclamation of Black Visual Culture." Slavery & Abolition 34.2 (2013): 202-221.

Gilbert Hernandez Interview

Interview with Gilbert Hernandez

Love and Rockets interview at 2007 comic con

Toxicity in Stitches

Throughout the graphic narrative Stitches, the reader is confronted with images that are both unexpected in the moment and left seemingly unresolved. As Ilana Larkin explains in “Absent Eyes…,” Small uses the juxtaposition between image and text to create a third level of narrative meaning. However, there are occasions in the narrative when images alone are juxtaposed, leaving the reader to fill in gaps and make sense of the fragmentation. For instance, the very first panel of the narrative depicts a Detroit factory spewing smoke into the night air. Throughout the narrative, there are other depictions of factories as well (page 66, which precedes the trip to Indiana; page 260, right after the therapist tells David his mother doesn’t love him; and page 284, just before his father explains that the x-rays gave him cancer). However, no textual mention is made to these factories. On the one hand, this creates a sense of expectation in the reader (or at least it did in me) that factories/pollution/toxicity will feature importantly in the narrative in some way. When we learn that David has cancer, it is possible to assume that he may have contracted it due to the toxic environment of Detroit’s factories. Additionally, other elements further accentuate a sense of toxicity in the environment, such as cigarette/pipe smoke and car exhaust, and this yet again adds to the ambiguity of what may have caused David’s cancer. On the other hand, though, when the reader discovers that the father’s x-rays gave David cancer and when by the end of the novel the toxicity of the natural environment remains explicitly undiscussed, the reader must grapple with how to situate these images into the larger narrative. As a result, there is an initial sense that this issue has been left unresolved; these images seem out-of-place or as incidental features of the landscape. Nevertheless, in true Freudian, psychoanalytic fashion, it is only through the context of the later events that these earlier images can be reinterpreted and re-situated in the larger narrative. In hindsight, these scenes of physical and environmental toxicity become visual metaphors for David’s emotionally toxic childhood. The smog, smoke, and exhaust ridden atmosphere of Detroit is shown to be less toxic in many ways than the Small household. After all, David’s parents, and not the literally toxic surroundings, caused his eventual cancer and psychosis.

Nature & Identity Paradox in Fun Home

I’ve been interested in the ways that Alison Bechdel uses nature in Fun Home, particularly in connection with some of the ideas that Hillary Chute raises about triangulation and the ways words and images work together in comics to more accurately represent truth.

Bechdel writes, “I have suggested that my father killed himself, but it’s just as accurate to say that he died gardening.” She then describes her father’s love of trees and flowers, and how this seemed suspect to her as a child, indicative of a lack of masculinity in her family that influenced her own gravitation toward strength and toughness. On the one hand, Bechdel’s father’s interest in landscaping is another example of his interest in cultivating a particular kind of household façade, while on the other it is, from young Bechdel’s perspective, a clue to her father’s secret identity and a danger to her family’s integrity, as well as an influence on her own identity.

Bechdel later describes the summer of her father’s trial, using the cicadas and the trees felled by the storm as physical manifestations of the unrest and unease of that time. She links the overwhelming sexuality of the cicadas to her developing body, and wonders “whether or not my hormonal fluctuations were the cause” of the “chaos” in the household that summer. The suggestion that Bechdel’s physical changes might have somehow contributed to the issues with her father is interesting, and reflects a complex perspective on the ways that family influences identity. Just as Bechdel adopts more masculine habits in response to perceived feminine weakness in her father, she suggests that he, too, may be influenced by her own sexuality and perceptions of gender.

Similarly, Bechdel’s experience with the snake while on the camping trip raises questions about the extent to which identity is inherent and the degree to which it is shaped in relation to one’s family and environment. When confronted with the nude calendar, Bechdel rejects its explicit portrayal of femininity and asks her brother to call her “Albert” in an effort to mask her gender. After seeing the snake, at the end of the trip, Bechdel sits in the car, while her brothers laugh about breasts, and explains that she had “failed some unspoken initiation rite, and that life’s possibilities were no longer infinite.” For both Bechdel and her father, the snake seems to represent the stark, biological “nature” of gender, indisputable in its physicality, but deeply at odds with their more nuanced and varied emotional experiences of gender.

When Bechdel asks her father why he is going to a psychologist, he responds “I'm bad, not good like you,” which highlights the paradox of identity central to the book. Bechdel’s father suggests that identity is inherent and unchangeable and possesses (or lacks) value. At the same time, defining his own identity in comparison to Bechdel’s highlights the ways that she and her father shape and influence one another throughout the book. Chute suggests that the interplay between images and words helps to counteract the limitations of each mode of narration, that truth exists somewhere in the spaces afforded by hybrid narration. In the same way, Bechdel illustrates the ways in which she and her father’s identities are both bound to and separate from one another, established in the nebulous relationship between the strict demarcations of nature and the fluid and invisible characteristics passed on through familial interaction.   

"Make It New" - Modernism & Fun Home

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is in many ways a Modernist work of literature. Beyond the fact that it references numerous Modernist novels and has a fascination with James Joyce in particular, its form and themes show traces of Modernism as well. One of the work’s most striking Modernist qualities is its recursivity. Overall, the work is reflexive and labyrinthine, as it circles around the absence of Alison’s father, Bruce, and around his hidden homosexuality. Bruce’s death not only created a void physically, but in retrospection, his apparent suicide casts a pall over all the memories that came before. Likewise, Bruce’s homosexuality, which is only discovered at the end of his life for Alison, creates a lens for her to retroactively understand many events from her childhood and many of her father’s behaviors. In its recursivity, Fun Home rejects a linear narrative and instead looks at elements of Bechdel’s life from different perspectives. Additionally, each chapter could almost stand alone as one way, among many, to tell the story of Alison’s childhood, from her early life growing up to her coming out as a lesbian and to her father’s death. In this way, the story seems reminiscent of Faulkner in particular, where stories within a novel often follow different perspectives or themes that combine into a narrative shaped mostly by the presence of an absent force.

In Hilary Chute’s reading of the work, she acknowledges many of its Modernist elements. When discussing the relationship between Alison and Bruce, Chute focuses on two primary themes: contact and progeny. Regarding contact, Chute highlights the embalming room scene where Alison hands her father a pair of surgical scissors. Although they come close to touching, uniting themselves over death, their hands never meet, leaving a gap between them. While Alison and Bruce are indeed drawn together by their few similarities (e.g. a love of literature and homosexuality), and while Bruce’s death sparked Alison’s interest in the archive of her childhood, which ultimately resurrected her relationship with her father, they have nevertheless taken distinct paths in their lives which, unlike the paths in Proust, never fully touch. Additionally, Chute acknowledges the text’s similarities with the works of Joyce, and discusses how, like Daedalus, Alison is indebted to her father and shares many similarities with him, yet she feels compelled to take her life in a different direction and to reject many of his ways. Alison rejects her father’s (seeming) heterosexual life with its subsequent procreation, closetedness, and sublimation, and instead seeks artistic progeny, openness, and honesty. Therefore, as the tagline on the cover declares, the novel is “refreshingly open” in more ways than one.

A final Modernist feature of the text that was not discussed, however, is the novel’s Poundian interaction with the past. Chute discusses in great detail Bechdel’s laborious process of re-creating and interacting with the archive, hand-drawing not only each frame of the comic, but also taking pictures of herself posing as each character in each frame and hand-copying letters, photographs, books, and diaries. Beyond the artistry, personal connection, and performativity evoked by this process, it is also reminiscent of Ezra Pound’s Modernist injunction to “Make it new.” And, in many ways, I feel that Alison’s struggle to make things new is one of the most prominent ways in which she differs from her father. For Bruce, the past needs to be re-created exactly how it was. Bruce is more Victorian, traditional, and classical: he restores a Victorian house, he enjoys biographies, and he is shown twice reading about the perfection of classical sculptures of the human body. Bruce has no desire to change the world around him; he does not want to alter the codes and structures that surround him in his small, Pennsylvania town. As a result, he lives a conventional life, all the while struggling to express his homosexuality in covert, closeted ways. Alison, on the other hand, is Modernist, unconventional, and forward-thinking. She does not dream about the past; she uses the past. For her, the archive, Modernist literature, Greek myth, and her own childhood memories are not things to be conserved or recreated. Rather, they are frameworks which she can inhabit and reformulate to say something new, to gain new insights into not only what took place when she was younger but to understand where and who she is now. Fun Home, for me, incorporates Modernist stories, of Fitzgerald, Gatsby, and Stephen Daedalus, in a similar way that Joyce uses the Odyssey, Eliot uses Buddhism, or Woolf uses Freud’s Oedipus Complex. All of these Modernist authors take structures from the past (whether the distant or the immediate past) and incorporate them into their works. This functions as a way of using that framework to provide a unique perspective for the story, but it also provides a way of changing that framework and accentuating its shortcomings.

Guilt and Postmemory: Artie's 2nd Generation Trauma

I have read Maus before, but, as always, time and experience have changed my reading of the narrative, and influenced the way I react to the characters. In the past I was very caught up in the anthropomorphism, and trying to determine if making the different nationalities into different animals wasn't, in some way, performing a similar kind of racism, or, at least, universalism, or generalization, as was done to the Jews--that they are somehow all the same, yet different from everyone else. The scene of Artie trying to determine what kind of animal Francoise ought to be highlights this--ought she to be a frog, because she's French, or a mouse, because she converted to Judaism (to please Vladek) (171)? The anthropomorphism also throws into sharp relief the economic and gender issues that complicate this universalization--Anja, for instance, is more recognizable as a Jew, or as a mouse, because her tail is sticking out, "he appearance--you could see more easy see was Jewish", whereas Vladek can get away with pretending not to be Jewish more easily because he has access to finer clothes--"a coat and boots, so like a Gestapo wore she he was not in service" and is more handsome (138). The putting on of different racial masks (like pig ones when they're pretending to be Polish--138, for instance) helps to illustrate the arbitrariness of the racism being enforced on the Jews; for the most part, other than racial stereotypes, their difference isn't visible, so as long as they are able to behave like the Polish people around them, or they run into someone who knows them already, they can move about to the black market; Vladek's good looks and money seem to give him an advantage; he can move a bit more freely than Anja, who looks more Jewish, and is frightened and unable to perform as well as he can; his money and contacts give them advantages that others could not have.

In my current reading, I am very interested in the way Spiegelman draws attention to the artifice of the work; including the section with different options for Francoise's appearance, for instance, or including the conversation with his father about with the comic will be like, collecting his father's voice, inserting the earlier comic about his mother's suicide, the photographs of his family set nearby the illustrated photographs of his extended family (why draw them, and not include them, like he does the others?" and, of course, Book 2, Chapter 2, "Auschwitz (Time Flies), when he depicts himself in the mouse mask, as Anthony pointed out earlier, discussing the success of Maus 1 while the pile of bodies below him gets bigger and bigger.... The photograph of Vladek in the camp uniform from the souvenir shop seems particularly troubling...and that he sends that photo to Anja so she will know he survived! The layers of truth and fiction inherent in that photograph, included in the narrative whose purpose is to explore the complications of the historical trauma of the Holocaust resonate for me. Combine this with the depiction of the very complicated Vladek/Artie relationship, culminating in the second to last panel, when Vladek refers to Artie as "Richieu," and it is very clear that the entire narrative experience is a way of working through the trauma of his past, for which Artie was not physically present, but must still work through, as it has shaped so much of his own identity, his parents' identity, and, now, his own career. Artie does not pull punches on himself or on his father in his depictions; his father is "the miserly old Jew" and he is the annoyed son who views his father as a burden that he would rather pawn off on someone else, like Mala. Layers of guilt seem to define Artie's identity; how can he compete with his ghost-brother; with the memory of his mother; with his father-as-survivor? How can he live up to all of that? And using all of that to somehow gain critical success--he has guilt about that, too. He really seems to believe that "Maybe EVERYONE has to feel guilty. EVERYONE! FOREVER!" (202). It doesn't seem like a trauma as huge as the Holocaust could possibly remain bounded in the memories and experience of the 1st generation, of those who actually lived it; of course it would bleed over into the children of those people, into the second generation, and even further and further from there. And the only way of trying to process that trauma, for those who did not live it, is through connection, like Hirsch suggests, through photography, through postmemory.

Are other kinds of traumas similarly passed down through family and culture? Could the racism of slavery in America and other countries similarly be understood through these kinds kind terms? Isn't all history, on some level, still working on us, shaping us, affecting us?

Maus Response: Icon, Memory, and Performance

As the interview with Spiegelman makes clear and Hirsch’s article further accentuates, Maus is overwhelmingly concerned with memory. Whether it is the memories of Vladek being both represented and questioned (as in the orchestra scene) or the working through of emotional responses to his father’s and his own memories by the narrator, Maus deals with traumatic memory of both the first and post generations. For Hirsch, the intercalated photographs mark the height of the work’s portrayal of the “inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience,” as they represent “the images already imprinted on our brains, the tropes and structures we bring from the present to the past” (106, 120). The photographs mark the site where the narrator can access his father’s Holocaust memories (as well as pre- and post- Holocaust memories), and they bring these memories to life in such a way that they allow for the memories to impact and be taken in by the son. However, in light the questions surrounding Spiegelman’s use of iconic, rather than realistic, mice in the text, I see additional access points between the father’s memories and the son’s, and the reader's, post-memories being highlighted in the text.

While Hirsch sees the realism of photography as pulling the post-generation into the memories of the first, I believe that the open, iconic images employed throughout Maus serve a similar function. For instance, after seeing the more realistic sketches that Spiegelman began with, it seems like the more iconic images pull the reader into the memories even more. By keeping the mice iconic, the reader can more easily see himself/herself in the images. While such imagery does not mirror the flow of memory to post-memory that exists for children in the post-generation (i.e. where memories are shared as photos, stories, nightmarish screams, and other expressions of trauma), they nevertheless extend post-memory to the reading audience. The reader’s face can more easily be grafted onto the iconic characters, thus making the story and its affect more personal.

The use of the more iconic mice, additionally, serves many more purposes. By using the iconic images of animals to metaphorize race, Maus shows how de-individualizing racism can be. In a world characterized by a racialized “us” versus “them” mentality, the fixation on race causes individual differences for all parties to be stripped away. While the mice and cats and pigs may have names in the text, they don’t have many individuating features. As a result, each individual becomes indistinguishable from the species, just as each individual becomes inseparable from categories of race under racism. Furthermore, the use of iconic images highlights questions of performativity within the text. For me, one of the most impactful images in Maus is the opening frame of Chapter 2, Book 2, on page 201, which shows the narrator sitting at his drawing desk wearing a mouse mask. Not only does this image jolt the reader out of a passive interaction with the text’s central metaphor, it also spurs the reader to consider how the artist, reader, and characters perform throughout the text. It suggests that in order for one to begin to understand the extent of the dehumanizing effect of Holocaust racism, one must wear the mask of the radicalized other, even if only for a short time in one’s imagination. Conversely, though, it suggests that identification can only go so far. We cannot become mice, we can only perform as mice. Finally, it causes the reader to become skeptical of the mouse imagery throughout the text. That is, does Vladek put on the mouse mask, or is his the true mouse face? Where does performativity end in the text? Especially when held alongside of the narrator’s claim that “In some ways he’s just like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew,” it leaves one to question whether or not Vladek’s post-Holocaust behavior is due in part to his inability to take off the racialized mask that was thrust upon him by the Nazis (133).