Maus - I

The book is really about two things, the first - a father/son relationship between a young man named Art and his Dad, a holocaust survivor from the Second World War called Vladek. The second part is a recollection of his Father’s experiences during the War for Art to use as inspiration for a comic book.

The comic itself is drawn in a simple style, with the characters all represented by different animals. For example, the Jews are mice, while the Nazi’s are evil looking cats. It is not a subtle tool that he is using, but its clarity makes the point clear and unambiguous. Later, masks are utilized - for example, when Vladek recalls a time in which he had to pretend to be polish, he is shown wearing a pig’s face as a mask.
The comic begins with young Art who is rollerskating. Vladek’s reaction to Art’s friends leaving him when he skates break sets up the dynamic between the two of them quickly. For Vladek, everything after his experiences can only be seen through the eyes of a man who has seen and experienced the things that he has. He compares the problems of a child losing his friends to his experiences in the Holocaust, to friendship being only truly determined after 5 days of hunger. It really shows how prominent it is for Vladek and how much time he spends thinking about the past. He really can’t move on. It seems apparent that Art feels a level of guilt for the neglect of his father on his part, but at the same time neglects him for a reason - that he really can’t stand him so when they talk it quite quickly becomes apparent that all Art really wants to know about is the past, specifically the holocaust. We also see during this chapter Vladek take large amounts of pills, mostly vitamins to keep himself healthy. This seems to tell us that one of the things that Vladek took from his experience is that survival is not easy, and you can only really rely on yourself to get through it all.
From here on out we begin to learn more and more about Vladek’s experiences and we pick up a few more traits, his resourcefulness in the war has now manifested itself into a inability to throw anything away. It represents the way, which is different to that of Anja and Mala, that he managed to survive. He will continue to use them, but they have outdated themselves in modern times, when he no longer has to use his wits just to survive. It is part of what makes his relationship with Art so strained.
For me, one of the most interesting things about this whole comic is the style choice and visual language that is used. It is a very symbolic piece and I can understand why as a work of art it got a large amount of coverage. It has a lot of depth to it, wrapped up in a story that is not an easy topic to do well. It is all too common to approach works on the holocaust and automatically resort to the tragic victim and I think while no doubt Vladek is a victim, he is not particularly likeable either. As such, I think it was a brave choice, but ultimately is what makes the character interesting and real.
Pt. 2 Based on Book II will be coming. (I only just managed to find a copy!)
P.S. God damn backstabbing smugglers am I right?

Elric of Melniboné

When I saw this on the reading list I got incredibly excited, so I’m sorry if this is somewhat preemptive. I’ll probably end up writing about this again as this post is likely to be less about the history of it, and more why it is important to me as a piece of literature and as a comic and what I loved about it.
Reading the tales of the albino, Elric of Melniboné, his sword Stormbringer and the tragic tales that followed him are some of my fondest memories. My dad collected the comics before I was born, so as I grew up I had an entire collection of his stories available for me to read. I don’t think he was missing any - I remember how proud he was of it. I think he still has them in their plastic sheets, hidden somewhere in his house. Before that, however, I remember my dad reading all the books to me, and this must have been before I could read well enough to do it on my own so I must have been quite young. Whatever my age (and I now question if they were entirely appropriate considering how old I must have been but I think I turned out well enough so it can’t have been too damaging…) I loved them and they hold an important place in my heart not only because they are an epic and wonderful collection of stories but because it makes me smile thinking about sitting in front of the fire, or in bed while my Dad would read to me. My heart also feels a little heavy too, because it has been so long since I got to sit and do the simple things with my family. I see my Dad maybe twice a year now, and I feel the weight of that now as I think about all the things we used to do together.
So, I’m sure you can see why this character means a lot to me - and I think that is the power of art and literature, and I think that is also why sometimes these recurring comics and books (and I’m sure the same applies to movie sequels), who follow one character for a long time can be both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, the characters become real people to us, each story exploring them more thoroughly, testing them and showing us more about them - about how they choose to deal with a situation. At the same time, it has potential to be milked, the same stories wrapped up in different paper for the sake of commercial gain or just pressure to appease a fanbase. I think the way they went about approaching an Incredible sequel is the right attitude towards the whole thing. Before they announced Incredible II I remember reading that when asked if they intended to make a second one they said something along the lines of  ‘Only if we find the right story to tell about our characters, we resolved the family problems they were having in the first one, we can’t retell that’. Either way, I think the stories they told of Elric were fantastic ones and if that has a slight bias on it because of its personal relevance then so be it.

The Strip, The Comic and the Web Comic

So why did the comic book come about? It offers the audience something that the strips don’t and in a time where the internet was not a resource everything had to be bought. If you were a big fan of a particular character and you brought a paper just to read his little strip each week then the chances of you spending a couple of bucks to grab the collection at the end of the year was incredibly likely. As such, financially it was a way to resell work that had already been produced. You could even advertise in the very same paper in which you placed the comic. Storing all the newspapers would be a waste of space and I’m sure would get annoying incredibly fast. So, in that regard shifting to the book makes sense. There are other practical reasons however. If you ever missed a week, you’d be stuck if there was ever a running, long term narrative so the comic book made that viable. The short panels also weren’t set up for it, they suit gags far better and to have a narrative would mean that it could take weeks before any resolution was found and I would imagine it would get incredibly frustrating week after week just to find out what happened to a character.
The comic book market already has it’s top dogs up there with Marvel and DC and is predominantly overrun with superhero books in the mainstream. So, while you can try and get funding to publish a comic you’ve made (and some people do), it’s unlikely, as a much greater financial risk, that they’re going to get funded. Unless you’re someone like Neil Gaiman and then you can kind of make what you like.  A comic is an incredibly large feat to undergo, it is a lot of work and there is no guarantee that once you’ve finished it that anyone will even give it the time of day or will even like it.

As a result, artists turn to webcomics in order to provide a cheap medium for people who are already having to pay the bills somehow, at college, or just with a passion to create a chance to pursue their dream of telling their own stories through a visual medium. Then, if that becomes successful the chances of someone putting funding into the webcomic becomes much larger as there is already an established fan base. They also, much like the strips, much better suited to gags, giving you a short and sweet place to tell your joke. In a comic book, you cannot shift between a narrative and then gags, but I’ve often found that webcomics can afford to do both. They may have multiple characters, some that are story driven while every so often having one comic be a specific character whom they just have a short gag about.

Peanuts

Peanuts has played an interesting role in my life, not a particularly large one, it was mostly confined to coffee side tables for light reading and I think a lot of it went over my head. I think at that age, I was looking more for the cheap gag than really trying to understand what it was the comic was really trying to say. I find myself fascinated with just a little research about how much darker some of the content seems. Lucy and Schroeder, for example - her pestering while he sits at the piano consumed by his work draws from his own relationship with his first wife and their damaged relationship. I thought it interesting that Steve Martino, director of the new movie from Blue Sky said that from what he’d heard that Snoopy was the character that Schulz always wanted to be and Charlie Brown was the person that he really was.. Suddenly, Charlie takes on a whole different meaning. From an awkward cartoon boy to an adult who isn’t happy with himself, wishing he were the confident and funny snoopy. Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, said that it was a ‘model of artistic depth and integrity that left a deep impression’ on him. To me, this is what makes Peanuts such an impressive comic, that it is drawn from something so genuine and has someone’s entire being poured into it. Left on the page under a thinly veiled guise for the mass market to see if only it looked hard enough. That must be quite intense, to tap into and then to share your deepest insecurities and thoughts and feelings with such a wide audience. Anyway, I think it is no wonder that Peanuts is such a popular and loved comic, the simplicity lends itself to the internal thought provoking nature of the comic without distracting from it and is a wonderfully charming to look at it. Added to this, the themes it deals with hits something real and I think that any comic that does this well has the potential to do well. I also think it is the hardest part to do right. Neil Gaiman said something in his commencement speech to the University of the Arts in 2012 that really struck a note with me and that is the following. -  ‘The moment you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself - that is the moment you might be starting to get it right’.

The Arrival

There were multiple things I loved about The Arrival. I thought it was an effective and relevant use of the lack of dialogue considering that it was ultimately a story about a person that doesn’t have a voice. They come as a stranger to a place where they don’t know the language, and while he can communicate through basic symbolism he manages to make individual connections through basic human kindness.

I thought the symbolism was incredible. The sharp demonic shapes in his home town tells us so much about what that city is like without giving it any particular shape or time. It lets the reader imprint some of their own understanding and experience onto the story while also not showing us a particular place or time. The benefit of this lack of specificity makes the individual representative of the greater. He is not one immigrant in any one period, he, along with the others in the book serve to say that everyone has a story, that they are people and that even through the darkness and the hard choices there is a brightness to be found in life. The use of strange unknown shapes and fruit puts us in the shoes of the protagonist, the world he knows is recognizable to both him and to us but as he travels to a place the he doesn’t know we see a world that is alien.

The pages that showed a passing of time were (like the rest of the book) really well done. Not only visually beautiful but I thought they were a simple but incredibly effective way of portraying that. The amount of drawings that he did for some of these pages was not a necessity, we could have understood what was going on in less, but the impact of those pages was incredibly valuable to the experience of reading the comic.