Tim – ENGL 685: Graphic Novels

Fast Food

I’m not sure who the intended audience is for Shooting War. It does have a couple levels of appeal – pimply 16 year old boys come to mind. Some drinking, drug references, graphically enhanced breasts, things that go ‘boom’ and the nasty guys get their due. I liked it. I don’t think I’d pay for it, but it would be an amusing way to kill time in a dentist office or airport.

More than anything, I found myself chuckling a lot: “History needs you. Global needs you. And we got great dental.” The Dan Rather cameo – “what’s the frequency Kenneth?” The oblique reference to Monty Python’s Life of Brian – “Abu, respectfully, it was the Iraqi People’s Front for the Defense of Islam.” Terrorists fretting over the set dressings before the televised beheading, and the comments from Global (read “Fox News”) executives: “Nice technique. All in the wrists.” Also note the Apocalypse Now reference in chapter 3, page 3.

It doesn’t have the gravitas of many of our readings this semester, but sometimes a comic is just a comic – not a graphic novel. Funny, interesting to read, some suspense, but in the end, more like fast food. No nutrition, but tastes okay.

The format reinforces my impressions. I’ve never been a big fan of reading on-line – there are too many distractions to give the material my full time and attention. That’s what’s nice about Shooting War – it’s a pleasant diversion between writing papers, answering emails and grading homework, etc., but you can’t put it on your shelf and easily pull it down when you want to browse on occasion.

Waltzing With Apocalypse

Interesting visual parallels between Waltz with Bashir and Apocalypse Now that show the surrealism of war. The first is Folman’s head emerging from the Mediterranean with the lights from Beruit lighting up his face. He appears transfixed as he as is drawn slowly towards the city and the massacre that is yet to happen. The second is the surfing scene. Ronnie Dayag and Frenkle lounging on a beach where soldiers are doing drugs and trying to avoid becoming friendly fire casualties.

There are other scenes where Waltz seems to have taken cues from Apocalypse. Little bits of surreal dialog pepper both movies. “How should I know? Look for a bright light. That’s usually where they dump bodies” is equal to the answer Capt. Willard gets when he asks a soldier who is in charge: “I thought you were Sir.”

In Waltz and Apocalypse nobody seems to be in charge. Ariel Sharon on his ranch and General Corman in his air-conditioned trailer in Vietnam are nominally in command and both could probably point to maps and intelligence reports to sum up the current military situation, but you get the impression that neither has any idea of what is going on with the rank and file. If they did then massacres and renegade Colonels wouldn’t happen. Or perhaps it is unavoidable. As Corman says when he orders Willard to find and terminate Kurtz: “…there’s a conflict in every human heart between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil. The good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.”

It’s All A Dream?

I enjoy ambiguity as much as anyone, but I think that an author also has an obligation to the reader not to make his or her writing so dense as to be incomprehensible, which is what I found in Santiago’s text. The mixture of at times indecipherable images and text is daunting. If a text is unintelligible, the reader looses interest. After several attempts at trying to wrestle meaning from Darkest Hour I decided that the easiest path would be to admit defeat, write about what I understand and see what others have to offer at the next class meeting.

As the twitter exchanges indicate, there is some confusion about the chronology of the book. “The actual story of the book is Omar getting up in the morning, going to work then he goes home and falls asleep watching TV” according to Santiago, who says that the book is not a “story line” (http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?threadid=26002).

This may be what Santiago had in mind, but he doesn’t pull if off. If Omar is asleep, then what we are witnessing is his dreams/nightmares, reflecting somewhat the conditions of his life as many of our dreams/nightmare do. Santiago’s novel replicates Omar’s thoughts/dreams and in effect, is portraying Omar’s disorientation. But without something to ground the narrative it is unsatisfying to the reader. Did he rape the suicide girl, or just dream it? Was he abused as a child, or is it only a nightmare?

Ultimately we are left watching the actions (or dreams?) of this very messed up young man. His sexual abuse as a child, his mother’s practice of santeria animal sacrifice, etc. may have helped him on his way to his current state, but his acts seem organic; the result of hay wired thought processes. Many have seen/experienced worse and not turned out the same. But if it’s only a dream, why are we supposed to care?

The question of whether of not to sympathize with Omar is difficult. As his story begins, he’s on the edge. Then he becomes a homeless vagrant, one of the crazies we occasionally cross paths with pushing shopping carts and mutter to themselves. He takes no personal responsibility for his actions, but personal responsibility can only be questioned when a person is responsible. In Omar’s case responsibility goes out the window when he looses his mental balance.

I would have gotten more out of Omar’s story if Santiago had given us more to go on. As it is, guessing about the nature of his fall, the chronology of his story and his character makes the book incomplete. There is not enough here to make a judgment. Maybe Santiago’s message is that we should not judge Omar, but that is not a satisfying one.

Essence of Shoeness

Picking up on Jay’s excellent post, I was struck by the form vs. function argument made by Ignazio/Mazzucchelli. It appear that Asterios = function and Hana = form or Asterios = Apollo and Hana = Dionysus. Asterios is the practical one, as we see when he purchases the “essences of shoeness” in the “abstractions” section that begins the chapter (What happened to the functionality of numbers!!) mentioned by Jay. But Hana, as we see from Mazzucchelli’s drawings of her sculpture, is not necessarily so. She’s about form in her art.

You get the feeling that this is a doomed marriage, not because their differences which as the book begins, it is not certain they will be able to overcome, but because of randomness. The section of the book that begins with an image of a clock and a screwdriver, presumably the clock he dismantled as a child, gives Ignazio’s thoughts on Asterios’ views on the Clockmaker theory of evolution as a grand design and Asterio’s preference for Greek deities because of the “random events of joy and tragedy that befall human beings.”

But his arguments that form vs. function is a duality rooted in nature (“abstractions” chapter) fails to take into account the utter randomness of everything in his life, including the asteroid that seals his relationship with Hana. He doesn’t hear the counter argument that randomness can create “superficial similarities that appear dualistic because we define them that way.” For a man so skeptical about a supreme force in nature, his argument contradicts itself.

While opposites attract, it is surprising that they marry, but not surprising when she files for divorce. They curl up as yin and yang on the bed, complementary opposites that interact to form a greater whole, after he tells her about the cameras he has installed to document if he is his Ignazio or if he is Asterio. While Asterio’s yin is about function, he has never built anything other than a tree house; Hana’s yang is always creating tangibles. The groundwork for friction is there if Astrios fails to acknowledge that the two halves of duality are equal, which he fails to do.

In one of my favorite passages from the book, he flashes back to when the essence of shoeness has left a blister on his foot. His memories of Hana, in all of her imperfect randomness, play across the top and bottom of the pages, while he pulls a puff of cotton from her ear with one of the three possessions he will save when his apartment catches fire – tweezers from a Swiss army knife, the ultimate functional item. This is the scene that marks the beginning of his return to her, as he realizes that randomness has created a near perfect duality.

Being Outside the Law

I found Bechdel’s references to “vintage” media in her work, especially newspapers and television, give Fun Home a sense of nostalgia, at least to those of us old enough to remember being kids during the 1960s. Particularly evocative is her repeated mention of the Blind Faith album (p. 95), which sets the tone for one of the scenes where Bechdel and her siblings encounter Roy, her father’s lover at the time and the baby sitter for her and her brothers.

Released in late 1969, the sale of the album was temporarily banned in America because of the cover art; a naked pubescent girl holding a phallic symbol. Until the alternative cover was printed and issued in the U.S., the album was hard to get and finding a copy of the British release, which is the version Bruce has, was a coup of sorts. Bechdel seems to emphasize this when she refers to her father “cultivating young men” at the top of the page; it would have been a magnet to a teenage boy at the time.

Her two renderings of the album cover also presages Bechdel’s painful entry into puberty with her confusion and discomfort reflected in the banned cover art. It’s a portrait of who she had such trepidation about becoming. The young girl on the cover, rumored to be a groupie slave and/or the illegitimate child of a band member, seems at easy with her nascent sexuality while Bechdel is anything but comfortable with hers.

The lyrics reproduced in the panel sum up the scene. Bruce’s secret is catching up to him at this point and Bechdel learns later that he has had a brush with the courts. Like Wilde and Blind Faith, artists who stepped on the moral conventions of the time, Bruce is pushing his luck with his escapades. He is living outside they law, which in 1969 looked at homosexuality as being against the moral standards of the day.

The Blind Faith album, along with her references to Wilde, could be seen as Bechdel’s way of pointing out the changes time brings to society views art and the human condition. By today’s standards, the album cover would be barely rate a glance. Today Bruce wouldn’t feel compelled to hide his homosexuality behind a sham marriage that brought such grief to him and his family. Like everything else from the 60s and 70s, if his life hadn’t been such a disaster to those around him, his views of himself and his homosexuality would seem almost quaint.

The Saddest Kid On Earth

I think Ware is commenting generally on the dysfunction that can run in families and that seems, at least to my reading of the book, to be come more pronounced as the generations of Corrigans moves from a simple, rural Illinois to a complex and modern Chicago. Both fathers and mothers seem inept at life. Desperate, at times needy, and definitely lonely, you don’t wonder why; they all seem self-centered and incapable of sharing themselves with anyone.

We have four generations of non-achieving, not-so-bright men, running the gamut from abusive and sexually maladjusted to quivering, indecisive stutters. Pathetic might be one word to describe Jimmy Corrigan as a whole, but looking at the generations of Corrigan men over time, they are cruel, sadistic, bigoted, and unloving as well as socially maladroit, clumsy, and, ultimately, sad. Jimmy is so perplexed by genuine emotions that he doesn’t know them when he experiences them; abandoning his step sister as she reacts to her father’s death, he doesn’t realize the sense of loss she feels for what it is until he cries in a cab heading home alone.

Jimmy’s mother seems to be not much better. Sexually indiscriminate, maybe out of loneliness or desperation, she plays Jimmy throughout the book, taking out her dislike for his father and her own existence by keeping him so attached to her that he has no life of his own. Until, in the end, when she needs him no longer, she pushes him out to be replaced by a new man. No surprise that Jimmy escapes into fantasy. One wonders how often this has happened to him in the past. To the Corrigan men, women in general are as confusing and cruel as the red-headed school girl who taunts his grandfather.

The city of Chicago also undergoes a transformation as we move through this history of Jimmy’s ancestors. Ware’s flashbacks, at times confusing, take us from a more bucolic and simpler city in the past, to a depressingly dark place where Jimmy goes through the motions. The rain and snow never seem to end in his life and the dark canyons become a metaphor for the Corrigans.

While Jimmy is the product of this dysfunctional genetic line, Ware shows us, through his adopted step sister Amy, that there are those who do not give up and let the world beat them down. We don’t see much of her, but she shows compassion for Jimmy and love for his father. Listening to him talk about his life, she seems to realize that nobody has cared for him before. She explains to him that spelling “HI” with bacon strips is his fathers way of expressing affection and seems to understand the disconnection he feels.

In the end, one hopes that Jimmy is not successful with his new office mate. The thought of more Corrigan males is too depressing to contemplate. While I enjoyed reading Jimmy Corrigan – The Smartest Kid On Earth, it is best if this Corrigan is the last of the line.

Text, Images, and History in “Nat Turner”

Moving back and forth between the photographs in the UVa archive and the Baker’s illustrations in Nat Turner, I was struck by the similarity between them. Barker’s drawings evoke the same tone of old photos: his choice of shading and use of shadows mimic, at times, the feeling one gets looking at tintypes. His selection of “color” – varying shades of off-brown for backgrounds and darker shades of black – in many ways replicate the lithographs, daguerreotypes and engravings of the period. His use of photographs as page “headers” (129, 130, 133, etc.) and the insertion of a sketch/photo of an axe (152), complete with manufacturing details and trademarks, also give the novel a sense of the straight-forward history and a chronology of events.

It is highly likely that Barker came across pictures of slaves during his research for the book and was influenced visually by what he discovered. As he states in the introduction, the genesis of the novel comes from his engagement with history texts and his curiosity about Turner’s rebellion and he is true to “history” in his drawings.

What little written text Barker does use works against the graphic text. The excerpts from The Confessions of Nat Turner move back and forth between a matter-of-fact recitation of events and the wonderfully structured sentences describing his spiritual development and final epiphany. The bland and gentle matter-of-factness of the written text clashes head-on with the brutality of the images. Turner mentions the kindness of some of his victims in his confession and then Baker renders an image of absolute brutality and terror as they are destroyed.

In terms of the mating of text and images, Barker’s Nat Turner is far removed from Spiegelman’s attempt to accurately the story of Maus. The “confession” of Nat Turn could be a distortion of what really passed between Turner and Thomas Gray, and Gray’s editorializing certainly calls into question the reliability of the narrator. Barker’s drawings, however, take much of what is said as a departure point from which he feels free to write a “novel” that captures what is not said, but what is implied by Turner. The retrospective vantage point of history bears out Turner’s words.

The first panel of the book is nothing more than a pair of eyes and the image of a book surrounded by black. It captures one of the themes highlighted by Turner in his confession; how the power of the written word can set us free. Barker mentions the power of written text extensively in his preface and then proceeds to create a text with only a minimum of words.

Forgetting Maus

I recently had a female student from Germany who had gone through the German pubic school system where it is required that students be taught about the Holocaust. She had read volumes I and II of Maus in the 10^th and 11^th grades and was clearly exasperated by the experience. Like the reporter wearing the cat/Nazi mask at the beginning of chapter 2 “Auschwitz (time flies)”, she asked why she should feel guilty for something that happened before she was born and expressed dismay at her country’s inability to move beyond the past, or at least allow her generation to move beyond it.

Should time and our removal from events mitigate the horrible things done by “us”? My student regretted the Holocaust and “felt bad” about it, but didn’t feel a part of it. Children of Holocaust survivors, like children of American Indians or children of slaves, do remember; as Chute discusses in her references to postmemory, remembering is the burden survivors of collective trauma must carry. The difference, it seems, depends on which side of the prison fence we view the situation from.

Artie is on the inside looking out. He didn’t perpetrate the horrors of the Holocaust, nor was he a victim in the camps, but unlike my student, he doesn’t have the luxury of forgetting. Writing in 1978, with Holocaust victims piled at his feet and a prison camp guard tower outside his window, Artie is as much of a victim and prisoner as his father, only his prison is his guilt.(41) Pavel tells him that, although he is in Rego Park and not Auschwitz, he is the real survivor. (44)

On pages 42 – 46, Spiegelman draws himself as a child, implying that he is unable, like Vladek, to extricate himself from his prison. Artie is compelled by his father’s story; he is as trapped in it as his father was in Auschwitz and Dachau. Vladek’s survival mode is to be as useful as possible to his captors; to be an English teacher, a tin smith, a cobbler. Most of all he credits he strength and good health for his ability to survive the beatings and anguish inflected on him by his captors. Artie’s survival mode is to be as useful as possible to his father while surviving the slights being heaped upon him. When Francoise suggests staying in “Mauschwitz” a little longer to help Vladek, Artie says he doesn’t think they’d survive.

Artie’s survival mode is also to create “Maus” and to not let the Holocaust become part of the past. Those who wish unpleasant facts to go away, as my student did, need to understand that they are now part of a collective worldview, which is why Maus is required reading in German school systems. As Chute mentions, the trauma Maus represents is unending; there is no closure or finality. Maus is a tale that adds the future to the past and present as Speigleman suggests in his proposed title for a Holocaust Museum exhibit: Never Again and Again and Again.

The Banality of Evil in Maus

My apologies to Hannah Arendt. The phrase “banality of evil” is lifted from the title of her book on the infamous Nazi Adolph Eichmann and the climate in Germany during the pre-war and war years. Arendt’s thesis is that while great evil was done during the Holocaust, much of it was done by ordinary people. Many of the perpetrators were not sociopaths or monster, but common citizens who acknowledged the German government and the government’s lie that the Jews were the cause of their problems. German citizens went on to participate in horrible acts with the thought that their actions were those of normal people doing what the state wanted. They did not think of themselves the way many of us think of them now.

I think this is part of what Spiegelman is saying in “Maus.” He makes his point by playing down the tale he tells and mixing into it the banality of the everyday life of a man now in his 70s. The main story line is Vladek’s life during the run-up to his imprisonment in the death camps, but other, secondary tales are related; his life as a Lothario, his marriage, and his wife’s depressions and suicide. His father’s second marriage to Mala and their apparent incompatibility is another theme in the first volume. His father’s problems with his eyes and his story about how he found the right eye doctor takes up 14 panels. All of these could be part of the story of any person from that generation and Spiegelman uses them give us the impression of ordinariness.

Spiegelman then blends scenes of horrible cruelty and suffering in to this seemingly ordinary tale, but in a way that doesn’t overly shock the reader. In four pages he takes us from the birth of his brother, Richieu, he and his wife’s trip to sanitarium, to the beginning of the pogroms (pp.30 – 33). This sequence illustrates how, at the beginning of Hitler’s rule, the war “just happened” to ordinary people. Unlike in America, where one minute there was peace and the next war, in Europe the climate of hate and brutality began to build slowly over a period of years. Ordinary people became acclimated to what was going on around them; Jews who were once rich became accustom to having food rationed and businesses confiscated. Many non-Jews bought into the propaganda and became to think of their Jewish neighbors as less than human.

This is unsettling to me. The terror of the book slowly builds. Like the insanity of Nazism slowly taking over Europe. I found myself rereading passages, wondering how I got to a particular point in the narrative.

Gaiman’s Illustrators

“Reading” Gaiman, it is sometimes difficult to say whether it is Gaiman himself that has the majority of the appeal, or if he should share top billing with his illustrator(s). The difficulty of separating the writer from the illustrator, or whether we should try to separate them at all, is one of the compelling questions of reading graphic novels.
Read “Coraline” and there is no doubt of Gaiman’s power to drive a narrative without the benefits of illustration (although there are illustrations on the cover and front piece and at the beginning of each chapter; 7 in all). When I read the script for Calliope for the first time, without turning back to look at the finished version, I was trying to picture the action, using only his description and blocking out what I remembered. It read like a script for a stage play or a movie, where the reader has the leeway of their imagination. I found myself wishing I had read the script for Calliope before reading the graphic treatment. Is the story affected by taking away our ability to use our own “graphics?” Is there enough of a story there to stand alone and be substantive?
Reading the script the second time as I flipped back and for between the two, I found a number of instances where the illustrators didn’t follow Gaiman’s script. The script of page 9, for example, seems to be completely disregarded except for the dialog. The panel layout, the shots of Calliope and the descriptions of the muses doesn’t fit what Gaiman asked for. Because it is labeled as the “Original Script of Calliope” there is probably a revised version that is more of a collaboration with the illustrators. There are a number of other scenes as well. I wonder how the story would have “read” if the script was followed exactly?
I think part of Gaiman’s ability to create such successful novels is in selecting the illustrator. “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the only story we’ve read where he collaborates with Charles Vess, is a good example. Vess captures the bucolic, “Prince Valiant” quality of England that I have come to associate with contemporary illustrations of that period. They establish a mood that fits the story line, even the night scenes, where a more “gothic” vision of Sandman is portrayed.
Gaiman gets top billing for the Sandman series and he should. He created the character and ideas, but he needs his collaborators to bring the fullness of his vision to the page.

Tales of the Watchmen

Who is the narrator of the Black Freighter? In many ways, he is a mirror of Dreiberg and Rorschack. Like Dreiberg he is naive and harmless, except to those who would do wrong. He is cast adrift in his story as is Dreiberg in his. While both struggle and appear to make a difference, their actions are futile against a much bigger world. Neither seems to control their fate. And, like Dreiberg, he is in love, but his love drives him forward and ultimate causes him to be cast out of society. Dreiberg’s love for Laurie, on the other hand, seems to final give him a place of sorts in the world that remains.

Like Rorschach, the narrator can commit murder when it justifies what he sees as ultimately good. He disguises himself, after murdering the money lender and the “pirate’s whore”, then becomes the “implement of God’s retribution.” (Chpt. 10, page 22) He, like Rorschach, suffers for his inability to see the futility of continued struggle. Rorschach cannot let go of a wrong, even when to expose it would cause catastrophe. Both pay with their lives.

The narrator and Adrian are also alike. While the narrator built his raft on the corpses of his dead shipmates in order to warn the world of the Black Freighter, Veidt confesses that he has “struggled across the backs of innocents to save humanity.” (Chpt. 11, p. 27)

Following the emergence of the narrator as a character in Tales of the Black Freighter, Moore’s comic within a comic, is a gloomy process. A sense of despair, horror and doom dominate the tale and parallels some of the story line of Watchmen. In the end, like Dreiberg, Rorschack, and Veidt, the narrator has no choice. He is destined to ride the Black Freighter, a member of it crew we presume, forever. Their destiny, like the narrator’s, appears to be ordained by forces they cannot control.

It is interesting that Shea, the writer of the text of Tales of the Black Freighter, is also one of the creators of Adrien’s “new life form” (Chpt.11, p. 25) that brings peace to the world by threatening it with extinction. The issues of Tales that Shea writes are published two years after he disappears, with the end coming as Veidt’s plan is realized.

Nothing to Reflect on in DKR

The DKR is intense. Almost too intense. The violence, either in the dialog or in the illustrations, never stops. There is no time to pause and reflect– is there a reason? There are interjections by the “media” that, at first, I thought served as a humorous commentary on violence. They are funny, but they appear to be there only to move the plot along and illuminate, in case we don’t understand, what we’ve just read. They have a plot and momentum all their own. Besides these instances of comic relief, there are even fewer moments of compassion and tenderness. Mainly though, DKR is violence: open the book to any page and find never ending mayhem and carnage. This is what we expect from anything in the universe of Batman.

We have black people and hints of gayness, alcoholism, drug addiction, and transgender villainy – all reflections of our “time”. But other than these, it appears that the “Comic Code” prevails in DKR. A flawed man is redeemed. The wicked are punished. The Batman doesn’t attempt depth. Life for Miller, at least reflected in his work, is a simple binary.

There are no surprises in DKR. We know what we are getting from the moment we begin. Adversaries change and grow; some are more colorful and kinkier that others, but in the end, good triumphs and evil is vanquished. Life goes on until the next time. In the Sharrett interview, Miller says that DKR is not pessimistic because the “good guy wins.” We knew that from the outset. How else could it possibly end?

As a kid I liked it a lot. I like it now, but not so much. It wears me out. It quickly grows stale. Maybe that is the reason for the intensity and violence. It hides the fact that there is really nothing to reflect on in DKR.