Author Archives: pierce

Respondents — Another Favorites List (!)

Time to play favorites with the course texts:

[Edit again: Even though it’s probably lost in the after-class void, I think I’d switch Maus and Fun Home here — putting FH at 3.  The more I mull Bechdel’s memoir over the more it seems to have to say.  Plus, I like that it deals openly with gender issues and homosexuality, both areas that I feel many writers, thinkers and people in general are cowardly about.]

Top 3:

1. Jimmy Corrigan

I loved this book.  As I said in response to Chandra’s post, Chris Ware managed to do something rare in that he was able (I think) to present a portrayal of intense awkwardness and loneliness in a way that wasn’t full of the wallowing theatrics of self-pity.  I loved all the quirky touches Ware includes also, like the cutout zoetrope, and the fact that these touches aren’t just non sequiturs, they have actually thematic significance as well.  Also, just some really great tragic scenes, like when the boy grandfather throws the tin horse-lump into the snow before frantically clawing it out again.  And the intricacy of some of the art is really fascinating, like the map in the front matter.  I could ramble about Jimmy Corrigan for a while, so I’ll cut myself off here, and try to abridge my next “reviews.” [EDIT: Abridgement didn’t work too well.]

2. Watchmen

Alan Moore is a scary, bearded nutjob genius.  The Rasputin/Charles Manson hybrid look-alike approaches the superhero mythos with characteristic narrative complexity and philosophical depth.  The characters of Rohrshach, the Comedian, and Dr. Manhattan are especially interesting to me.  The book seems to invite the readers to identify with (or be intrigued by) Rohrshach specifically, perhaps as a cathartic impulse at the perceived ongoing injustice in the world, and then forces them to confront the question of his lawlessness and violence, the moral conundrum he presents.  Ultimately, Watchmen is about the nature of power, and it’s such an incredibly fascinating analysis of it, and its uses and abuses.  Really incredible. (Also, love the “opposite” color palette.)  If there’s anything problematic with the text, it’s probably that there really aren’t any compelling female characters, but I guess that could be a reflection on the superhero genre in itself.

3.  Maus

Of course, Maus is legendary, so I doubt there’s anything new I could say about the “why” of its effectiveness or appeal.  The most compelling (need to stop using that word so much [EDIT: The word “compelling” appears six times in the span of this list]) Holocaust narrative I’ve come across.  I think academics and theoreticians are right when they say that the comic / graphic novel medium has a unique appropriateness for traumatic material or retellings of traumatic material.  Maus is the case study for that.  Either way, really amazing stuff, and certainly Art Spiegelman deserves his fame.

[IN PROCESS OBSERVATION: Holy crap I’m writing way too much, so I’m sticking to explaining my top 3 and a bottom 3.]

TIE 4/5. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns AND Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic :  (Tie because they both deal compellingly with such similar issues.)

6. Uzumaki

Bottom 3:

7.  Persepolis

Sorry, Marjane.  Although I think Persepolis is a good piece of work and a compelling one,  this is the third time I’ve read it through for class and cracks are showing.  I feel like the childhood portion of Persepolis is the most interesting, perhaps because it juxtaposes the idealism and innocence of childhood with the violence and subjugation of revolution and authoritarianism.  I feel, ultimately, that the reason Persepolis is interesting is because of the unfamiliar context of the Iran war and political struggles, when these are removed, the narrative loses its uniqueness or freshness.  And these are removed more are less in the Austrian section.  Maybe in part I’m reacting to the hype the books / film received on release, probably due in part to loose comparisons drawn with Maus.  I guess I’m saying Persepolis is overrated.  Still good, but overrated.  Or maybe I’ve just read it / talked about it / wrote about it too much.

8.  In My Darkest Hour

In my opinion, this book might be better titled The Pathetic Misadventures of a Womanizing, Self-Pitying Douchebag.  Although towards the end I was able to salvage some sympathy for Omar, throughout practically all the narrative he was thoroughly unappealing.  Obviously, being bi-polar is no cakewalk, but valium and forties of OE aren’t going to keep you level.  So, he self-medicates and then complains about feeling like crap.  Omar is sometimes narcissistic, frequently misogynistic, and always pathetic.  Not disturbing, just lame.  As a saving grace, the surreal collage artwork was interesting.

9.  American Born Chinese

This book just had no teeth.  I think if you’re going to address topics as layered and heavy as immigration and racism you have to be willing to push the envelope, because its ground that’s been tread so often before.  I realize this graphic novel was aimed at a wider audience, but still… No envelope pushing, and nothing new.

First Readers – Fun Home, Language and Modernism

As I started Fun Home, I wasn’t sure what to make of the language and allusions.  Although sometimes prone to verbiage myself (is using verbiage itself a case in point?), I felt going into the graphic novel that the vocabulary was a little excessive in some places. Who smells garbage in the summer and labels the smell “putrefaction”?   Also, whenever anyone starts name dropping Proust my entire mind shuts down.  However, I waited it out, and once Proust had passed, and the revelation of her acute childhood OCD had come into light, the specificity of the language started to have more of an impact on me.  I started to look at the language as something almost pathological, something that represents Bechdel’s obsession with her own identity, and discovering that identity.  What I mean is that Bechdel’s extremely specific word choices exhibit both an intense need for an accurate self-representation and an intense anxiety about misrepresentation.  Choosing the exact word is a way of combating the insecurity of the memories of her childhood and her relationship with her father.  Bechdel’s own pathological insecurity about her memory and the veracity of her own sense experience is clearly shown in the “I thinks” of her early diaries, not to mention the compulsive diary keeping itself.

We discussed modernism in relationship with the text, and I was still thinking about the “why” of the elaborate, highly allusive nature of many modernist texts after class.  And then I remembered that modernism arose largely as a response to World War I.  The devastation and violence of this war was almost incomprehensible in scale.  It was a global trauma without precedent, and the writers of the modernist movement sought to reframe their writing in ways that addressed the experience of living in this post-traumatic world.  In some cases, this apparently amounted to an attempt to frame contemporary experience through classical or mythical allusions, generally, as I understand it, to highlight the profundity of “modern” experience, the sense of living in a momentously new time.  In a similar way,  Alison Bechdel utilizes allusions to show how incredibly profound the effect of her father’s death and her troubled relationship with him were, especially through the image of Icarus and Daedalus.

As a random aside, I would recommend anyone interested in reading a prime example of modernist “hyper-allusiveness” and inscrutability to check out Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

Also, if you check the #eng493 feed on twitter I posted a set of literature parodies by the comic book artist R. Sikoryak, which include one of a modernist, Kafka: http://bit.ly/3tzkto. (Hint: It’s the one with the bug in the zig-zag sweater.)  And a familiar name from Bechdel, Camus:  http://bit.ly/3QUKN.  Definitely worth a look.

First Readers: The Female Body as Symbol in Nationalist Ideology

The concept of The Veil returns in book two of Persepolis.  This led me to thinking about the way the female body is characterized to political ends, and the danger of such characterizations.  Using the female body as a symbolic representation for the nation is a common trope in nationalist imagery.  For example, a national personification is the anthropomorphized image of a nation;  for the U.S., we usually think of Uncle Sam, but there is also Lady Liberty.  Outside of the U.S. there are figures like Brittania (the U.K.), Germania (pretty obvious), Helvetia (Switzerland), Mother Svea (Sweden), etc.   All women, with the exception of Sam.  These bodies are invoked as rallying images especially during times of war.  The implication of choosing this symbol in patriarchal societies is pretty obvious in this wartime context.  If you don’t stop the “Other,” he is going to rape what is essentially a psychological surrogate of the woman/women in the male citizen’s life.   This imagining of the female body obviously denies the woman agency, and is overtly attuned to play off of (and promote attitudes of) xenophobia and the fear of miscegenation.  These statements may seem extreme and hard to fathom in terms of a symbol as ubiquitous and apparently innocuous as Lady Liberty, but looking at the Iranian regime’s codes of dress reveals the same basic concept.  By making the female appear increasingly deindividualized and iconic, they are more and more denied individual agency and become another symbol of the national body.  Similarly, the increasing social prohibitions shown in the narrative place the female body higher on a nationalized pedestal.  The woman’s sexuality is no longer her own, but is something to be called sacred and exploited by the regime to incite nationalist sentiment and reinforce the oppressive patriarchy which is necessary for its continuation.

Respondent: Satrapi’s Aesthetic examined through Chute’s Article

At the risk of sounding redundant, I also want to examine the aesthetic decisions Satrapi made to frame her narrative – specifically the “simplicity” of the art. (Not using quotations here to imply a condescending rejection.)  The most fundamental components of this simplicity as detailed on the blog seem to be the following: monochromatic color scheme (black and white), a lack of shading, and abstract representations of the characters.

There are a couple of compelling quotes from Thursday’s reading which may illuminate the reasoning behind these aesthetic strategies.   I am referring here to the Chute article.  Hillary Chute asserts that Satrapi’s minimalist aesthetic is central to getting the narrative’s message across: “the narrative’s force and bite come from the radical disjuncture between the often-gorgeous minimalism of Satrapi’s drawings and the infinitely complicated traumatic events they depict” (99).  And, as the narrative details Marji’s childhood, the abstract nature of the art embodies “[the emotional landscape of a child, which is] is moving paradoxically because of its distance from and proximity to the realities it references” (103).  Chute draws special attention here to the image of the man who has been cut into seven pieces.   Marji as a child is unable to fathom in her imagination a real picture of a dismembered body, so we instead get the mannequin-like image of the man split into hollow, bloodless pieces.  So, essentially, Satrapi shows here the impossibility of adequately representing trauma, but also the horrific implications of that inadequacy.  For the latter, Chute says, “in its accessible syntax, its visual ease, [the image] represents the horrifying normalcy of violence in Iran” (103).

Hopefully this helps articulate some of the underlying ideas I read in the posts, and will offer some transition into the reading.

Searchers – Acme Novelty Archive

http://acmenoveltyarchive.org/

While looking around for resources and information pertaining to Chris Ware, I stumbled on this website, which is remarkable to say the least.  It is essentially a _massive_ database searchable for anything and everything relating to Chris Ware and his work.  As an example of the kind of fun / interesting material available here,  follow this link to see assembled versions of the paper models included in Jimmy Corrigan and elsewhere by Ware:  http://acmenoveltyarchive.org/gallery/index.php?dir=./Paper%20Models

(Click inside the individual frames to get a magnified image; the thumbnails don’t show up on my computer and might not on yours.)

First Readers: Racial/Religious “Typing” in Maus

Right off the bat, I want to say that I read both books through last night, so there may be “spoilers,” but more than likely they’ll be thematic, not specific.  I don’t think there’s much to spoil about the holocaust.

Approaching Maus here on the blog is a little intimidating, considering both the gravity of its subject matter and the amount of interpretation its already undergone critically, so bear with me.  A lot has been said already since the work’s publication about Spiegelman’s decision to visually “categorize” different racial and religious groups as different animals.  Many early readers were taken aback by it.  However, it becomes obvious through reading the text that this typing, (an apparent manifestation of racist attitudes similar to the Nazis own propaganda of alienation concerning the Jews) is intended to dissolve through the reading, to satirical effect.  Spiegelman himself has stated  that the decision to portray Jews as mice was based on the Nazi perception of Jews as vermin.  Co-opting this device, then, he uses racial branding to the exact opposite effect and intention of that of the Nazis.  There are fractures of solidarity in all of the “animal” types represented in Maus.  As a broad example some non-Jewish Poles are portrayed as sympathetic to the Jews, some flatly anti-semitic.  Now, jumping ahead to next Tuesday’s reading… (sorry.)

(MAYBE KIND OF A SPOILER? UP NEXT)

Perhaps the most telling example of how problematic (and arbitrary) Spiegelman finds this typing is at the very beginning of book two, when he is talking to his French wife about what animal type she should be represented as.  They argue, but in the process her conversion is brought up.  Apparently, she converted to Judaism strictly in an attempt to please Vladek.  This process is jokingly referred to by Spiegelman in the panels: “So, you and I go to a mouse rabbi.  He says a few magic words and ZAP! …. By the end of the page the frog has turned into a beautiful mouse! (12)”  This section highlights the generally arbitrary nature of racial and religious typing, while showing  Spiegelman’s own conflict about the way in which he represents these “types.”

Searchers, The Question of Fascist Undertones in Miller, Batman

http://snipurl.com/rptb1

The above link is a blog post by one author concerning alleged fascist undertones in the work of Frank Miller with some substantial back and forth in the comments.  The presence of fascist attitudes has been a popular accusation with regards to Miller, Batman, and superhero comics in general. For this reason, I think it is valuable to examine the post and comments as a typical discussion of this issue. It is, in my opinion, safe to say that Miller’s work occasionally incorporates fascist ideals (300 being the big example).  (I am definitely not saying that Miller himself is fascist / loves fascism and fascists / wants everyone to be fascist or that his work is one big hurrah for fascism.)  Ultimately, however, the post and comments shed a certain amount of light on the underlying politics and themes of Frank Miller’s work, and reader reception to those perceived politics, if not to the actual politics of Miller himself.

(I also do not vouch for how competent or articulate the blogger and commenters are… some points are poorly argued, or operate within a definition of fascism that is excessively broad.)