Maus

Maus, by Art Spiegelman, is an incredibly moving story. It is an account of the Holocaust from the point of view of Spiegelman’s father Vladek, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz. To say this graphic novel is inspiring, ground-breaking, and masterfully told would be a wild understatement.

The choices Spiegelman made in the telling of this narrative were truly ingenious, but none more so than the decision he made to portray the characters in this novel as anthropomorphic animals. By doing this, a level of abstraction descends upon the characters and events, removing them from reality just enough to allow the reader to approach them with a level of subjectivity that would not have been possible otherwise. The psychological impact of cartooned characters and stylized backgrounds that Scott McCloud writes about in Understanding Comics is seen clearly as a result of Spiegelman’s art style. Through this simplicity, the audience is able to process the horrors of the Holocaust more readily than they would have otherwise been able to.

In contrast with his innocent style, the artist does not shy away from breaking the fourth wall. By showing actual pictures of the real people portrayed in this story, an awareness is struck. The fact that this is nothing more than a graphic novel – some lines drawn and inked on a piece of paper – becomes obvious again and again. Spiegelman clearly wants this as (in addition to the photos) there is a scene where Vladek and his wife Anja are hiding in a cellar: she complains about there being rats and Vladek (portrayed, as all the Jews are, as a mouse) placates her by saying that the rats are only mice. In the second installment of the story, an entire page is dedicated to Art’s character trying to decide what animal to portray his wife Françoise as. As much as he wants to tell the story in a way people can more easily understand, Spiegelman refuses to let his audience forget that this is a true account.

The contents of this story, and the context in which it is told, bring a new credibility to the graphic novel as a viable medium for serious material. The fact that it’s told through mice, cats, dogs, pigs, and frogs does not subtract from its sincerity – if anything, it adds to it. Like Will Eisner, Spiegelman caricatures the individuals in his narrative to help the readers more quickly identify the kind of character they are being introduced to. The simplicity is not a result of the lack of sophistication, but the presence of clarity.

In Maus Art Spiegelman achieves a new status for graphic novels. As a result of this story, stories that deal with a large number of characters, various locations, the passing of time, and deep themes are no longer meant solely for traditional novels. Through this work, Spiegelman secures a well-earned podium for graphic novels among the other “serious” media in literature.

On Robert Crumb's Work

Mr. Natural, by Robert Crumb, is an underground comic from the early 1970s. The nature of the titular character, Mr. Natural, allows for the telling of just about any story that Crumb could conceive; upon reading a few of the stories, it is more than apparent that he really did tell any story he could conceive. If the overall narrative of the story is not offensive, as in “Mr. Natural’s 719^th Meditation,” Crumb finds ways to insert characters with offensive design, conduct, or – in some cases – both. In the aforementioned story, Crumb just briefly hints at an unsympathetic, cowardly police officer. In “Mr. Natural and the Shuman Human in ‘Om Sweet Om,’” there is an extremely unflattering, racist portrayal of a number of African-American characters. However, in “On the Bum again,” Crumb does not stop at offensively portrayed characters and dives right into a convoluted approach to what Mr. Natural claims is not child molestation, but clearly is. The atrocious imagery is absolutely unnecessary, but Crumb basks in it not because he should, but simply because he could, one of the most defining aspects of most of the Underground comic artists. The needlessly repulsive nature of many of Crumb’s narratives reflect this fairly consistently, anchoring him as a perverted individual in an age in which comics of this “flavor” began to flourish, feeding a depraved audience who lived for the artists’ fetishes.

A Comparison of A Contract with God, by Will Eisner, and Blankets, by Craig Thompson

A Contract with God, by Will Eisner, and Blankets, by Craig Thompson, are two graphic novels that share many similarities, even if those similarities occur on vastly different levels. In Eisner’s A Contract with God, the story focuses on Frimme Hersh, a young boy who is repeatedly told that “God will reward [him]” as a result of his good works among the members of his village and, later, New York. After tragedy befalls him, he breaks his ambiguous “contract with God” that certainly had everything to do with him ensuring that He would indeed reward him for his good works, as long as he continued to do them. This leads to a life of greed and promiscuity until he eventually tries to return to an absolutely certain understanding with God, in which faith plays no part. In Thompson’s autobiographical Blankets, a similar plot plays out. A little boy is promised that by “asking Jesus into his heart,” he will be saved no matter what, and comes to lean on that belief. When uncertainty and eventual heartbreak find their way to him through the first love of his life, Raina, Thompson loses that hope and his faith. Both graphic novels focus on the hopes and dreams of childhood playing a large part in the process of growing up and the adults we become as a result of them, but neither are hopeful stories (A Contract with God is blithely satirical, at best). Both paint a grim picture of religion (with most of the people playing the secondary roles are sampled from one extreme or the other), and prove that there can be no hope without faith. A Contract with God and Blankets paint  grim, unornamented pictures of the conceptions of children and the common faithlessness of the adults into which these children grow.

Tintin in "The Blue Lotus"

The Adventures of Tintin, by Hergé, is a charming comic with many facets. The story “The Blue Lotus,” may be a children’s comic, but Hergé deals with some very mature issues throughout the story. Racism had almost always played a large part in comics throughout the early and middle 20^th century, but here the author decides to confront some of those stereotypes – especially those dealing with the Chinese – and dispels them. Tintin comes across as a very mature, clear-sighted boy who is not afraid to go against a person he knows to be in the wrong, even if that person is an adult. On top of the very “grown up” theme of cultural ignorance, “The Blue Lotus” focuses on the main character’s struggle to thwart a drug dealer, further deepening the already rich subject matter of the narrative. The storyline is anything but a line drawn between Point A and Point B. There are several plot twists that good investigative stories demand. The illustrations of the comic are simple, with little or no shading, bright colors, and easily, simply drawn characters. The backgrounds are abstracted to a level of easily understood cartoons of the real-life objects being depicted. That is not to say that the drawings are childish or unattractive in their simplicity, there are some exceedingly beautiful large panels, especially those used as establishing shots when new cities were introduced. The Adventures of Tintin: “The Blue Lotus,” by Hergé, was a pleasantly surprising reading experience with even more charm than I expected to encounter in this comic.