RanXerox

RanXerox, by Stefano Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore, is an Italian Science Fiction comic from 1978. Coming into the story with no prior knowledge of the narrative or any of the characters, I thought I was beginning to enter a comic of an entirely different genre. The story opens up as a group of people dealing drugs – and going through the inevitable drama that goes along with that. Lubna, Ranx’s love interest, talks about being able to control Ranx completely. In the subsequent panel, Lubna is shown to have removed the top of his cranium (like a cap) and begins to tinker with the mechanical inner workings of the man’s mind. Not knowing that this was a Science Fiction comic, I thought the authors were speaking metaphorically, that Lubna was able to control Ranx because he loved her, and was therefore transformed into a piece of machinery powered not by conscious, rational thought, but by the whims of his almost disturbingly young lover. A few panels later, however, I realized that Ranx was, in fact, a robotic man (whom I later learned was built from parts of a Xerox machine, of which fact the name is indicative). This misunderstanding proved to be a fairly good indicator of the theme behind this comic. Every single character is either being used or using someone, usually for sexual reasons. Lubna, on several occasions, uses Ranx to make money while simultaneously cheating on him, then tries to assuage him with sexual favors – these favors are mainly for her benefit, however, as his robotic nature does not allow him to reap any sort of enjoyment from these exploits. Through my misunderstanding of RanXerox, I was clued into the narrative to come much faster than I would have otherwise.

March: Book One

March: Book One, by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, delves into a firsthand account of the suffering caused by segregation and the Jim Crow laws that ultimately led to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. The graphic novel’s tone is set through an introduction that consists of a march for equality in which peaceful protesters are being “dealt with” by angry members of the police force, each officer equipped with tear gas. The writers, however, are careful to abstain from placing the blame for this mistreatment of the African American citizens of the United States; a gentle, nonjudgmental narrator simply states the facts and backs them up with vivid, emotionally invested art that brings the reader inexorably into that tumultuous time for the sole purpose of bringing to light what it was truly like for people living during that period of U.S. history. Important historical events and people are referenced, but so too are local heroes finally given their due; there exists here a parallelism between local and national struggles. Ultimately, the novel sheds rays of hope over the grim state of the government by highlighting the power of people’s voices in a democracy. The fact that this story is told by means of a book (a graphic novel, no less) puts power into the hands of the common individual. Through a medium in which offensive, inaccurate stereotypes abound, those very same tropes are shattered. Through March: Book One, it is shown that words change people; words can sway the opinion of an entire government. In short, words are power.

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.