Category: Links

Literature in Fun Home

The characters in the graphic novel Fun Home are greatly influenced by various works of literature. The mother in the household is enthralled by the art of acting. In Chapter 6 of the graphic novel, the mother figure spends her time rehearsing for the play The Importance of Being Earnest. After helping her mother rehearse lines, the protagonist becomes interested in the play as well. The same thing happens later in the graphic novel with the literary works The Odyssey and Ulysses. Both she reads for school, but help her to create a connection with her father, much like Earnest did with her mother. Below I have linked the sparknotes for all three pieces of literature. By reading the overviews and summaries on the sparknotes page, it can help make some of the references in Fun Home easier to understand. Rather than the references going over your head while reading, you can read the sparknotes of the three literary works and understand things you wouldn’t have without reading Earnest, The Odyssey, or Ulysses.

Sparknotes for The Importance of Being Earnest

Sparknotes for The Odyssey

Sparknotes for Ulysses



A glimps into how she made it

Here is a clip of Alison Bechdel talking about how she wrote the book. We touched on it a bit in class on Monday, but I thought it was an nice video clip to watch of her actually talking about how she went through the process of making the book. You can see her posing for the panels and then how she makes every panel through photoshop and drawing.

Museum

So I found this link to a really crappy 90’s website. If you were on the internet in the 90’s you’ll know what I’m talking about:  http://www.nmajh.org/exhibitions/maus/index.htm

Apparently there was a Maus exhibit at the National Museum of American Jewish History. I really wonder what the exhibit had in it; all I can imagine is enlarged print-outs of the pages. I just thought it was interesting.

Teaching Maus; Critical Comics

In one of the earlier posts (I was searching for it but couldn’t find it) Prof. Sample posits that one of the reasons why Maus may not be more widely taught in the academic world, in particular in high schools, is because of a built in prejudice against the graphic narrative as a medium.  This is a sentiment I agree with.  It also got me thinking about what it would take to establish the legitimacy of the art form as well as what adjustments would need to be made in order to make Maus a “proper” history text.

In the introduction to the Los Bros Hernandez’s Love and Rockets Vol. 1 the author/critic Carter Scholz argues that the main reason that comics haven’t been treated as a serious art form is because they lack a history of criticism necessary to establish an academic tradition.  Initially only Europeans like Umberto Eco treated comics as works of art deserving of critical thought and analysis wrote deeply about the subject.  In Scholz view having a critical body to work from allowed the artists/writers to hone their craft and develop the art form but also said to the world at large that comics are worth of critique, therefore they are worthy of being considered art.  I would argue that in todays comic world that body of criticism does exist, but that sadly outside of Europe and East Asia it is still widely ignored.  How do we change this?  We teach the art form so that the youth going forward will know how to approach and even respect it.

So with that in mind I found these links about how to teach Maus in the classroom.  The first is about using the work as a way to engage less literate students as well as a means of introducing controversial topics, such as guilt and the erasure of atrocities from history.  The second introduces the concept of a Readers’ Circle where the students all read a piece of the work and then convene for a Q&A session asking questions as; “Why does Art shrink when he goes to see his shrink?”

Finally we have Art Spiegelman himself, now 61, talking about a seminar he is to deliver about his work on chronicling the history of the medium.  Perhaps comics most celebrated creator talking the issue of a critical body will be good, no?

I also find it amusing that when I typed Spiegelman into the post, Firefox said it was spelled wrong and suggested Spielberg instead.  Perhaps proving the point Scholz, Sample, and myself are all trying to make.

Conversation with Art

While searching the web I found this interview with Art Spiegelman on YouTube. The interview is about him talking about his drawing style and how he perceives comics.  I find it interesting to see an actual interview with him, because I had this picture in my head of him and really seeing him has made the already real book all the more lifelike to me.  While the interview isn’t about Maus exclusively, I still find it a very interesting video.

 

Art Spiegelman Interview

Meta Maus

So when I was searching the great wide interwebs looking for interesting links about Maus and Art Spiegelman, I ran across the Steven Barcley Agency website’s biography of Art Spiegelman. More interesting  than the (very standard) biography is the link in the right-hand column which lists Spiegelman’s works and has a picture of a book called Meta Maus. Indie Bound and Amazon both list it as coming out in October of 2011, but interestingly, on both sites there is no product description explaining what this book is: another sequel in the series? Something entirely new? Something entirely unrelated?

As it turns out, the book is going to be “like the Criterion DVD [of Maus I and II] that has [Spiegelman’s] notebooks, [his] sketches, rough drafts, interviews, transcripts, photos, historical references made into a work that can sit next to Maus.” I found this description of the book in an online interview with Art Spiegelman, conducted by Rebecca Milzoff. Personally, I’m very excited for this collection to come out as I’m interested to see how Spiegelman organizes or narrates the material. The books are already highly saturated with metamoments so having all of this outside information will make for another of layer of meta in which the author is telling us about being the author who is telling us about being told his father’s story of the Holocaust. Anyways, the rest of the interview is pretty entertaining as well, especially Spiegelman’s take on therapy as vomiting, and how he does not consider his work therapeutic.

Oh, and one last thing that probably won’t apply to many of you, but if you happen to read Portuguese, I found this Portuguese language edition of the book online. I just think it’s funny because on page 41 he’s talking about how the 15 foreign editions of the book like it’s a bad thing and here’s one of them.

Maus in Context With Global Events

I found this really neat timeline that overlaps the main events that occurred in Maus with global events and  Art Spiegelman and his family’s life. In a way I think it kind of puts the story of Maus in a different globalized context. This time line interested me because even though I am aware of the fact that Maus is a biography seeing this time line made me realize that Maus isn’t just some story. Its someone’s life. I like that the fact that this time line contains links to some of Spiegelman’s different works. The rest of the website also contains links to some useful resources about Maus and Art Spiegelman.

Spiegelman’s Life

Maus: The Soundtrack

Personally, sometimes I can’t work without some music in the background. According to this snippet from NPR’s Intersections, Art Spiegelman also needed a little sound to inspire him while creating Maus. Along with the recordings of his father Vladek, Spiegelman also tuned in to the Comedy Harmonics (read the article), both of which you can listen to on the site.  I had some trouble playing the recordings directly beneath the article, but the ones at the top of the  page are interesting when you put them into context. The clip from Vladek is transposed almost verbatim into the comic, which I felt really made it pop in terms of authenticity.

If you look around the sight (i.e. just below the article and somewhere to the right) there are also some links (some broken) to articles about Maus from NPR and other sites.

Disney With Fangs – Grant Morrison on We3

After some extensive searching, I found this archived interview with Grant Morrison in which he discusses the ideas behind We3. The most interesting part, to me, was when he started talking about his feelings about animal rights. Morrison claims that if humanity wants to create a noninclusive identity – i.e., everything that is human can be defined by everything that is not animal – then humanity has to understand animalkind in a way that isn’t concerned with animal cruelty and the mistreatment of nature. That, to me, is the strongest theme in the graphic novel.

History through Images

What really struck me about Nat Turner was the whole concept of retelling a real historical event through the medium of the graphic novel. The ability for the images to stir up such intense emotions in a reader really speaks to the power of graphic novels as an art/storytelling form. And certainly after reading Barker’s novel, we’re all very aware of the historical events surrounding Nat Turner and won’t soon forget them. It seems to me that if you really want a story to be told, and want it to resonate with readers who might otherwise be unfamiliar with the events surrounding it, you could really make use of storytelling through a graphic novel.

We’ll be seeing this again later in Maus, for sure, but I was curious to see what other pieces of human history have been retold through the eyes of graphic novelists. I came across a pretty long list of graphic novels that deal with “historical events,” which indicated that a lot of writers have already latched on to my assertion about this medium is perfect for connecting readers to people, places, and events of the past. I’m providing links to the PDF “Learning History through Graphic Novels” as well as some links to the particular novels I thought paralleled the conceptual storytelling behind Nat Turner.

Yossel, April 19, 1943 by Joe Kubert: a story about the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
Fallout by Jim Ottaviani: graphic novel about the Manhattan Project’s key players, like Oppenheimer
Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms by Fumiyo Kouno: follows the story of a family post-Hiroshima bombings
Vietnam Journal by Dom Lomax: the story of a war correspondent based on real events from the author’s life.
Deogratias, A Tale of Rwanda by J.P. Stassen: deals with the Rwandan genocide

There were tons more, so definitely check out the PDF if you’re interested in doing some graphic novel reading outside of our class!

Funny Man Gets Serious.

I found this interview with Kyle Baker.  In it the interviewer brings up how funny all of his work had been before Nat Turner, his daughter following in his footsteps, critics’ reactions to his work, and making money as an artist.

He pointed out that when the first part of the book came out critics loved it (black babies dying?  History, it’s okay), but when the second half came out (black men chopping of white children’s’ heads!? Outrage) critics used terms like “brutal.”  I forget that when it was originally released it was not together in one book.  I wonder what the reaction would have been if it had all come out together like how we have read it this week.  I also really enjoyed his last comment about wanting Nat Turner to be used educationally in college classrooms.  I’m glad he got his wish!