I was curious to see what else Rutu Modan had done and my searching led me to a blog she wrote for a while for The New York Times. The blog consists of comic strips that aren’t much like Exit Wounds. Most are snapshots of different situations and life and for the most part funny. One that I particularly enjoyed is titled Queen of the Scottish Fairies which tells a story about a young boy who enjoys wearing a skirt. There is something of Fun Home in this, and I found it very funny.
Author: mdietz
Other graphic media in Maus
I have read Maus before, and one of the first things I noticed that I had not seen before was that the title pages of each chapter have a sort of movie-poster quality to them. Page 15 really made this apparent to me when the backdrop to Spiegelman’s father on an exercise bike is a movie poster for The Sheik, the 1921 movie which the first chapter of Maus takes its title from. The other chapters have similar title pages, each with a different name usually written in a text that reminds one of old adventure movie posters. Later on in Maus, on page 102, Spiegelman reproduces another comic of his inside the page. This mimics the sort of frame story which Maus is: a tale of the author’s father but also of the author himself and his interactions with his father as he reacquaints with him to be told the story.
Batman through the years
Dark Night Returns being a major reinvention of Batman made me wonder what the comics looked like before Frank Miller’s version. After some searching I found this site that put together a large image that takes a few issue covers from each decade Batman has been around and displays them along with a short description of the content and changes of each decade. Being around since the 1940s, there is a huge amount of Batman comics written and drawn by a number of different people. The covers provide a nice, quick way to see the differences in art style.