Maus: Midterm Essay

Maus is story of the Holocaust, but also a story of remembrance and the relationship between father and son. 

Maus's framing device makes the tragic story seem eerily familiar. We all have dark family tales, and Speigelman is telling us his. We are able to digest the story as a memory, and cutting away to the present gives it vitality. A generation away is almost more accessible than if the story was actually told from the fathers perspective, day by day.
We see Vladek as a flawed and idiocentric man rather than the stoic hero. One of my favorite moments of interaction is when he nonchalantly throws away his son's coat because it's too shabby. It's an excellent moment of characterization that I relate to with my overbearing grandmother. Vladek seems to at once be hoarder and a trasher of cherished items. The biggest one and key element of the story is Anja's details notebooks that he burned.

His character is so confounding, having contradicting feelings and actions on a host of subjects. We feel this because Art does. He says something to the effect of "how do I presume to tell the story of my father when I haven't even figured out my own relationship with him." Art slightly breaks the fourth wall a lot by acknowledging that this is a comic book that he's constructing. My favorite part of this is when he can't decide what animal Françoise should be and they discuss it together. It reveals the artistic and intellectual process behind Art's decisions, and shows a moment of their relationship. A very successful scene that accomplishes multiple things at once.

The pull back to the present can be shocking. Your wrenched out and allowed to process with the characters. It can be used for comedic effect of sorts as well. A series of clautrophic shots of the family in a ghetto with the mom screaming about not giving up her baby is contrasted to three open panels of the dad peddling. He still discusses the deaths of the war but this old mouse on a bike is undoubtedly funny in a way.

He explores the nuances of personality throughout the family tree, but I think Anja is one of the most heartbreaking and fascinating. He aggresive confronts you with her postpartum despression.

Speigelman chose to depict this incredible serious story using cartoony anthropomorphic animals for many different reasons. Referring back to Understanding Comics, we really to the iconic depictions of ourselves

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Graphic Narrative

I read the Will Eisner novel Dropsie Avenue. One of the fist things that struck me was that the art style seemed almost Baroque. Steep contrast using lots of absolute black to convey drama. Tense compositions. The subject matter of the first scene could be baroque or biblical, hatred of another clan causes a man to do an unspeakable horror, leaving two graves under the same family tree. The subject matter that takes up the majority of the novel isn't exactly what you would expect from a classical painting or a pulp comic book. It details the squabbles and relationships of a neighborhood. Not exactly the mundane details of their lives, but the events and arguments that define them. It was fascinating to me how he didn't need to stick with the same characters to have a consistent story. A vignette would focus on one family and after the conclusion of their main drama we would hear characters a generation later lightly gossiping about their great horrors that befell them. I reme...
Read more

The Killing Joke

What is your reaction to the text? This dark manifestation of the Batman and Joker dynamic was one of the best superhero stories I've ever read. It was not afraid to get violent, but seemed to value psychological terror over gore. This is best emphasized in the creepy train ride commissioner Gordon was forced to take. The maniacal depictions of the Joker coupled with his nihilistic musings are a combination to fear. I've never see a Joker origin story before, so I reacted strongly to it. He mentions he "remembers it one way, sometimes another," so I think this is one of many possible origins and we shouldn't take it as absolute canon. I do believe he was a relatively normal person once, and something so terrible happened he had a psychotic break and decided to love his new self. What connections did you make with this story? Thematically this work was very familiar to me. I connected it with the tropes of the male hero, crazy villain, moral compass, and dams...
Read more

Understanding Comics

Scott McCloud's comic about comics not only taught me how comprehend graphic narratives, but media in general. Words and pictures in combination are such a part of our daily lives that we hardly ever take a second to analyze them. A lot of what I read seemed obvious as I read it. He dissected the basic building blocks of comprehension. How we create closure when part of the image isn't there.  We infer not only time but motion and action between panels. We see a raised axe with motion lines juxtaposed with a scream over a skyline, it's us who decapitated him. I'm currently reading Chew, a comic series about an FDA agent who can detect the entire history of every bite of food he eats. He uses this to solve crimes and often is forced to eat human flesh. Murderous sadists and cannibals abound, it can be kind of a gorey ride. The artist often uses this subject-to-subject transition technique to get around showing the super-violet details. In once scene, a raging canniba...
Read more