Questions on Bayou and Shooting War

I raise two questions for the web-comics, one each, that stuck with me as I read through each of them.  In Bayou there is a strong repetition of the hand and butterflies throughout, what do these symbolize in the story?  On the third frame we see the image of the dangling feet of a man hanging from a tree with the images of the butterflies becoming visually integrated with the drops of blood/they are the drops of blood?  Also, the tree roots are drawn like fingers holding onto the land and we could also say strangling the man.  The images of the butterfly or the shape of the butterfly continue throughout, but become most apparent again when Lee sees the butterfly-man underwater and frame 16 when the butterfly appears before Lily’s locket is taken.  The repetition of the butterfly in these scenes brings both a sense of death since they appear in scenes of death or possible drowning of Lily.  At the same time they appear to be forces of life/protection for Lee.  We see in 13 that she is surrounded by butterflies and nature can hear the sounds of the Bayou while Lily cannot.  What does this say about the black slaves relation to the land and life?(tree holding ground, maybe not part of hanging, but rather holding the man?)–particularly when 3 frames later we see the white hand come out of the water and grab the locket–a white man sees only the material and monetary? Seems appropriate considering the white men paid for Lee and her father to risk her life to find the little boy, relying on their knowledge of the bayou.

And for Shooting War I held many of the sentiments that have been posted already.  One question I have is if anyone else felt a lack of movement throughout the piece? And by movement I mean simply within the images themselves.  The images seemed to me to be very stagnant, on contrast to every other graphic novel we have read.  I think this may be because of the mixture of media and how those created different distances for each layer — it just did not blend well.  I was also thinking it could be because of the lack of the traditional frame/gutters of traditional graphic novels, but Bayou did not have gutters either and I did not have the same sensation.  The lack of movement of motion made this web-comic difficult for me to get through, especially paired with the large amounts of text that bogged down the images.

Reality of PTSD

When I finished reading Waltz with Bashir I was not sure what to make of the novel as a whole. The reality and brutality it portrays and the journey to rediscover that reality and bring it to light.  But when I was able to set the novel down and step back I was drawn back to the article we read with Maus on PTSD. I feel that this graphic novel really captures the stress of trauma and the power of the mind to both cover up and remember traumatic events.  While reading I often found myself trying to figure out the chronology of events as the novel jumps from one person’s memories to another person’s, and going from an anecdote back to the memory of the war.  The Traumatic Stress article notes that the difference between a stressed person and someone suffering with PTSD is that “they start organizing their lives around the trauma” (6).  The closed nature of a novel, and the fact that this novel is one man’s journey to uncover the reality behind one particular memory, for me, presents the tension and stress behind trauma, war, loss, etc. that the other graphic novels we have read about war were not able to capture.

The novel begins with the image of the hungry wolf-like dogs hunting down the narrator, which immediately put me on guard for what would come — it set up a sense of insecurity, entrapment, fear which parallels the feelings created from PTSD.  And then the novel ends with the abrupt switch to actual photos from the massacre that has remained in a limbo state between real memories and false/uncertain memories, but then becomes too real.  The reality of the final images i think shows the power of the mind to forget such images, and the power of the mind to protect oneself from those images and memories.

Santiago and Garcia Marquez

I too am having trouble grasping and dealing with everything in Santiago’s novel, but what stood out for me was the beginning with Omar reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel La Cronica de una Muerte Anunciada / The Chronicle of a Death Foretold.  This detail in the introduction of the novel seems to lend to many themes/styles that Santiago may be trying to weave into his narrative.  Garcia Marquez is famous for his use of magical realism across his stories, which focuses/challenges opposites.  I can see Santiago taking the themes of magical realism – presenting the conflicting perspectives of rational Omar vs. manic/depressed Omar, past vs. present, life vs. death, etc.  We do not see any instances of the supernatural in Santiago’s work, which is often a component for magical realism, but I think it could be argued that Omar’s various mental states (depression, mania, drunkenness, sex, memories, etc.) sets up reality/normal world against another space.

Second, I think that the inclusion of Garcia Marquez’s novel, title alone, and the story itself frame Santiago’s novel. A death foretold, I think, characterizes Omar’s depression and the dark themes of the book.  Death is foretold for everyone, we are all going to die, but we must trudge through life or as Santiago proposes like pigs through the slaughterhouse.  People raised the question of the chronology of the narrative, and I question the end of the novel.  The final frame is all black — does Omar go to sleep? Or is it his final sleep?  We have the sense that his life is more steady, but we have no evidence of positive turns in Omar’s life from the rest of the novel, so does Santiago’s introduction with Garcia Marquez’s novel foreshadow or maybe is it meant to influence our conclusion of the text?

Is Santiago making a modern graphic novel of Garcia Marquez’s text?

General Sherman

While reading Guibert’s memoir I did not have the same sense of connection and emotion that I felt while reading Maus, but rather felt a greater distanced from the story and storyteller.  In Maus I felt that the transitions between the past and present provided the characters with a personality to connect with and create a rounded identity.  In reading Alan Cope’s story I feel the terse language necessary for comic books does not lend to the narrative, but for me stood out as choppy and detached.  The first time I did gain a greater sense of Cope and an overall cohesion of the novel did not occur until page 252.  In describing the name of the largest sequoia, General Sherman, as “too bad for the tree” (252).  In a story based upon Cope’s life surrounding the war I found page 252-253 the most telling of Cope’s commentary on the war and his life that I overlooked or maybe was lost in the earlier pages.  I feel that these pages bring to light that this is a memoir of a part of Cope’s life, but not of his entire life.  The war did not define Cope’s life, but was a major component of the relationships he built, career paths, etc.  And in looking at page 253 where the tree is represented as a large white expanse, contrasting with the dark tree trunks we see on the adjacent page suggests that maybe this may be an illuminating moment for Cope as well as the reader?   This confrontation with a physical representation of war (the name of the tree) and life (the conversation held with the tree shows this connection) seems to prompt a clarity Cope had been searching for; a clarity to return to Europe, the place of his combat experience, but in a new role not defined by the war.  Does this return show that the war actually show that the war is not a part of his life, but rather has defined his life?

Needed text

I am still not quite sure what I think about Jimmy Corrigan – an uneasiness, confusion, and trying to piece it all together.  Like others posted I was grateful for the summary in the beginning of the book to offer some clarification and a and break from the steady stream of consciousness.  But when looking back through to write the blog the first thing I did was to compare Jimmy Corrigan to Nat Turner and I primarily was struck by the text of Ware’s novel, which offers a great contrast to Baker’s novel.  Nat Turner relied almost entirely on the power of the imagery with only the few blurbs from Turner’s confession, whereas Jimmy Corrigan relies heavily on its text.  Without the text and dialogue of the novel I would have never been able to piece together the story or even come close to the dialogue Ware presents.  Obviously as a graphic novel the images play a vital role in the comprehension and interpretation of the book, but I think that more than any of the other graphic novels we have read thus far Ware’s offers an equal role between the illustration and text.  The heavy reliance of the images upon the text stands out for me in simply following the images.  When there are no arrows to tell me which image to read next I piece it together by piecing together the text.

The heaviness of the text that I feel throughout the text I think feels more prominent because of the silent, withdrawn, awkward character of Jimmy Corrigan.  Plus the images must be read like a sentence more than I felt with the other novels.  The breakdown of the panel into the small squares creates a choppy sentence of pictures that I must read slowly along with the text.  In the other novels I did not feel as if I was ‘reading’ the images exactly but more taking in the elements of the illustrations, this time I feel that I moved slower through the novel because of the intricate interplay between the text and illustrations.

Sorry this is a little jumbled; I am confusing myself now trying to navigate through my navigation.  I hope this makes a little sense.

No timeline

Like many of the other responses to Maus II I too enjoyed the greater interaction between the past and present in this volume.  We see more of the details we needed in Volume I of how the past has shaped the present of who Vladek is and why his relationships are the way they are, but I think more importantly this volume attempts to create a connection between the past and present that is larger than Speigelman’s story.  The simple fact that Spiegelman feels a need to write the story of his father’s survival shows how he sees how this story needs to be told to the contemporary audience, but in this volume we see Art’s struggle to understand that reasoning which I appreciated and made me better appreciate the story.  We see Art’s struggle on page 68 when Art needs to put Vladek’s time in Auschwitz into an understandable timeline, closed and contained.  Vladek responds to Art’s questioning of time saying, “So? Take less time to the black work. In Auschwitz we didn’t wear watches” (Spiegelman 68).  We see the timeline of the right side of the page stretching almost half the page. Spiegelman begins the timeline with Vladek’s entering into Auschwitz in 1944, which seems to negate Vladek’s the struggling and survival prior to Auschwitz presented in Volume I.  However, the timeline Franciose’s exclamation from the present cuts off the timeline, leaving the timeline unfinished and seeming continued into the future.  In Chute’s essay she presents page 68 as a layering of the past and present, but I see it as more a continuation of the past into the present, a history that cannot be contained by a beginning or an end.  I think this need to contain the history of the Holocaust shows a need to keep the past in the past, but we see throughout the novel how that is not a reality.

We see this struggle with the past and its confinement/simultaneous presence through Art’s feelings of guilt and inadequacy in this volume’s beginning.  Art’s therapist pushes Art to question the need for his book and tells him, “People haven’t changed…Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust” (Spiegelman 45).  The therapist states that there is no end to the timeline, people have been the same since before the Holocaust until now – genocide and prejudice still exist.  We see this presence through Vladek’s own racism towards the hitchhiker.  But I think more importantly the therapist questioning of the need for another Holocaust story to push Art shows how history needs to be conformed for the present.  It isn’t that history is confined to a timeline, but that how that time in history is presented gives it an end.  By breaking the mold of creating a nonfiction, biographical comic about the Holocaust he puts an end to the timeline – the past enters into a present medium of history and thus crosses that gap that we see him struggle with in order to understand and present the story.

Black and White

Throughout The Dark Knight Returns there exists a tension between a fantastical world and a world based on reality.  This distinction stands out for me in the contrast of black-and-white versus color images, most notably in that the images of Commissioner Gordon  are always in black-and-white.  Gordon’s contrast is particularly evident on pages 58-59.  On page 58, fourteen of the sixteen images consist of Commissioner Gordon and the only one with color is the image of a member of the mutant gang.  The adjacent page includes images of the television, Robin, and Batman all in color.  Even the darker image of Batman stands against a blue sky and the density of the black used to color him, well, colors him. Even in the color heavy second half of the DKR Gordon’s images remain in black and white as can be seen on page 175.

The juxtaposition of these pages pronounces a distinction the book desires to make between Commissioner Gordon and the other images of the book.  Perry Nodelman’s article on picture books states that black and white pictures remind us of our “experience with newspaper photographs” and that they “tend to imply seriousness and authenticity” (137).  I agree with this in that having the Commissioner in black and white we are reminded of his humanity. Look at Gordon’s face and the evidence for seriousness and authenticity can be read in the marks of age and stress as compared with the lack of these lines and expressions in the faces of the people on the adjacent page.  Moreover, Gordon is a kind of realistic batman or maybe the poor man’s version of batman because he fights crimes and fights for justice from a more real-world perspective. Or maybe the black and white evokes a sense of nostalgia for a Gotham City before the mutant gang and before Batman was needed to instill justice.

If black and white is meant to bring a sense of “seriousness and authenticity,” what sense are the heavy color images throughout, but particularly those of the television, supposed to evoke?  I don’t want to say triviality and falsehood, but maybe to be very literal it speaks to the idea that television colors the seriousness and reality of its reports. The character of Batman also coincides with this idea – one must look past the costume and mask to discover the real man behind it all.  Do we see a triumph of authenticity in the end when Bruce leaves Batman behind and rallies his troops as Bruce?