Maus, Animals, and Race

One of the interesting bits of background about Spiegelman's text is that the mice were not originally drawn quite so cartoonishly.  Instead, Spiegelman drew them in a manner that was more realistic/ human-like, clearly based in part on the famous photographs of concentration camp survivors taken by photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White.

Original sketch for Maus

Bourke-White photo from LIFE magazine of liberated prisoners

With this in mind, it's interesting to speculate about just why Spiegelman chose to revise his original mice into something more cartoonish.  Does it have something to do with the icon and identification, as McCloud would have them?  Is Spiegelman's decision to portray the Jews as mice problematic because it fundamentally essentializes race and trades in stereotype?  Or, as we will see more clearly in Book II of Maus, is he trying to suggest something more subversive about race and national identity--and the combined ridiculousness and danger of racism?  Does Spiegelman's choice to use animals in Maus encourage or forestall identification, in your opinion? Would you have responded differently to the mice if they were drawn in the manner of the more realistic, anthropomorphic sketch above?

Another important aspect of the Jews-as-mice, Germans-as-cats, Poles-as-pigs metaphor is its historical accuracy in terms of the stereotypes in currency before and during the war, as well as the preoccupation that many Germans had with whether the Jews were a race.

Beginning during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, roughly coterminous with the Enlightenment's investment in creating scientific and racial taxonomies, anxiety about Jewish racial difference came to center around the Jewish body. Many Europeans became obsessed with the idea that Jews were members of an inferior, non-white race. Part of this obsession centered around the idea that Jews had distinguishable physical characteristics that rendered them decidedly other.

Sadly, many stereotypes found their way into caricature.

 

Above, you can see early examples of Jewish caricature that focus on supposed physical differences of Jews, including large noses and ears, oversized feet, and talon-like nails.

Later Nazi caricature traded in similar stereotypes of Jewish physical difference. (see below)

During this period of anti-Semitic propaganda, Jews were often likened to vermin, particularly mice and rats.

The Nazi film, Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal, or Wandering, Jew), one of the most disturbing anti-Semitic propaganda pieces, featured scenes that juxtaposed "typical" wandering Jew with images of rats and mice overrunning various parts of the globe.  This image (a still of the rats can be seen below) suggested that, like vermin, Jews spread chaos and disease, literal and metaphorical, wherever they went.

For more on anti-Semitic stereotypes, you might check out resources such as Sander Gilman's work on The Jew's Body, this book on Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, or this book on Nazi propaganda.

For more early sketches and background on the creation of Maus, take a look at Meta-Maus, Spiegelman's behind-the-scenes account of the creation of his work.

Discussion Post on Maus from Jordan--please respond before Tuesday!

Jordan had some trouble posting, hence the late post:

Chapter one gave us some background of the life of Artie's father (Vladek). What do you think of how the characters were introduced to us? What purpose did Chapter one have for us as readers?

Chapter two, what do you think of the way the story is being told?  The characters are all animals and it is told through the perspective of Artie. What do you think the purpose of this is? Also, what do you think of the story and how it is tackled in chapter 2.

Finally, Chapter 3 gives us more incite to Vladek's life. Which wraps up my section, but what do you think of the story so far? I really enjoy the art style of this comic, the black and white fits really nicely with the tone of the comic and I feel I binge read through the reading and did not realize how far I was and ended up finishing the comic. I feel that the comic style really helped the story and I definitely enjoyed reading it as a comic. The characters were all solid and I feel it helped the story more as a comic.

Maus and Art Spiegelman

When Art Spiegelman published MAUS I in 1986, he transformed the medium of comics and greatly affected the American literary world. His work experimented with the traditional form of the comic strip at the same time that it altered forever the content associated with the medium. Spiegelman's choice to depict the Holocaust and its aftermath in a medium often associated (rightly or wrongly) with children, cartoons, and simple caricature changed both the landscape of the comic and that of Holocaust representation. Comics or "comix," as Spiegelman dubbed them, were suddenly taken much more seriously than ever before. MAUS I and II appealed to a broader audience than did the conventional comic strip. When MAUS won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 (after the publication of the second volume in the series), Spiegelman's work drew even greater attention. Since the publication of this magnum opus, he has become one of the comix medium's greatest advocates, traveling the country with his Comix 101 presentation and arguing for the importance of the form.

Spiegelman was born in 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden. His parents, Anja and Vladek, who appear as central characters in MAUS, were refugees, survivors of the concentration camps and World War II. Using the medium of the comic and the figures of the cat and mouse to represent Nazi and Jew respectively, MAUS tells Spiegelman's parents' stories, as well as his own. After getting his start by editing and writing for the graphic magazine RAW, in which early drawings from MAUS were serialized, Spiegelman went on to draw covers for The New Yorker for a number of years, eventually falling out with the editors due to the political nature of many of his drawings.



How does Spiegelman's medium affect his message in MAUS? Is there something sacrilegious about his representation of the Holocaust? Do we read his work as straight memoir, fiction, or some hybrid in-between genre? Has he chosen the appropriate vehicle for telling this story?

New Formal Discussion Post from A. Marisa Ansari

A. Marisa was having trouble posting, so I am posting the following for her:


Formal Discussion Post: Ch. 7-9 Understanding Comics (Ashley Marisa Ansari)

As an art/design student I found McCloud’s argument of comics being art to be fascinating and true. Do you agree that comic is an art form? Do you think McCloud made a valid argument with substantial points? Art is found in everyday activity, just not credited as art. Is there anything that McCloud didn’t mention that you could argue makes comic art?

Color and comics… McCloud assures us that what two things are the reasons for lack of color in most comics? Do you appreciate colored comics or black and white comics more? I think the colored ones give me a sense of nostalgia for some reason, but I favor the black and white ones more. Thoughts?

McCloud states that comics have the seed of expressionism and synesthetic. Can you give an example of that? Even one McCloud has touched on. How did you like the book? I really enjoyed it and thought it was insightful. It was also a fun read. What are your thoughts on the format of the book?

Formal Discussion Post #2--Chapters 4-6 of Understanding Comics

In these chapters, McCloud builds on his earlier points about the specifics of comics as a medium (vs. a genre) that requires reader participation to construct meaning.

In Chapter 4, he expands upon the notion that comics is a medium of space vs. time. What does that mean? Why is space so important to comics, whereas time is a more important aspect of the craft of other visual media, such as film?

He also talks a lot about how comics convey emotion. What are some of the examples he gives here? How do comics make us feel emotion using a specifically visual vocabulary?

In Chapter 5, he focuses on the uses of the panel. What sorts of panel shapes does he discuss and how do they impact our impression of the story, as readers?

Finally, in chapter 6, he talks about comics as an interplay of words and images. How do words work alongside images to create narrative in comics?

First formal discussion post--Weigh in by the end of the weekend!

McCloud's definition of comics is quite broad.  Do you think it's too broad? Why do you think he leaves his definition so open? Would you include the examples he does under the category of comics? Why/ why not?

One thing we can all agree upon, however, is the centrality of his theory of the icon to his idea of comics.  How does McCloud use the term "icon"? How does it relate to the comparative imporance of the cartoon to comics?

Finally, what is the gutter in comics? How does it function, like more iconic/ abstract images in McCloud's estimation, to encourage reader participation? What is the concept of "closure" relative to the gutter?

Obviously, there's no need to engage with ALL of these questions, but try to weigh in on the three topics in some regard by the END OF THIS WEEKEND! Our next (formal) post will be on Tuesday.

Are comics a medium or genre? Why is it important?

Read the following excerpt from Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics about the question of whether comics (it sounds strange to make it singular, I know) is a medium or a genre. What is the difference between a medium and a genre? Why does Wolk suggest it matters which one we label comics?  What does he mean by "highbrow" comics?  Can we put a work like Spiegelman's Maus, with which we will begin the semester, and Archie (seen above) alongside one another?

Getting to Know You

Despite the fact that we might not get to meet one another in-person, I thought it made sense to open the semester by introducing ourselves.  Below, please post a brief introduction: your name, major/ year, knowledge of or interest in comics (if any), and a line or two about a favorite book/ movie/ television show/ comic to give us a sense of your taste. 

I can start: I'm a professor in the English department at UC. I teach classes on contemporary American literature, especially comics, the modern novel, literary theory, and race and ethnicity.  I am happy to talk to you more about the department here at UC or other fun classes you might take or (gasp) careers you might pursue with an English degree. I love teaching this course because I really enjoy comics, particularly what has come to be called "the graphic novel," and think that comics have forever altered the contemporary literary scene and made us think about how images, like words, can tell a story.  I have countless favorite books, movies, television shows, and comics; like a lot of you, I imagine, I am a bit of a culture junky.  I'd have to say, though, that I am obsessed with the show Transparent and also enjoyed the depressing, but amazing, Cinemax show, the Knick. What about you?

Welcome!

Welcome to ENGL 3084, Comics and Graphic Novels!  I'm excited to work with you this semester in this online course devoted to thinking about the ways in which words and images work together to make up the medium we call comics.

To get us started, we will start by reading Scott McCloud's germinal work, Understanding Comics.  Understanding Comics is dated in some ways--it was published during the 1990s and it seems like it. You can almost imagine it being carried to the coffee shop under the arms of flannel-shirt-wearing, grunge-listening 20-somethings. Still, I think it explains what comics are (or maybe what they're not...) better than many more recent publications do.  And, if nothing else, it will set the stakes and the vocabulary for much of what we will discuss subsequently.

Here is some more McCloud to help set the scene! 

I'll make a subsequent post with more resources about comics if you are interested in reading more about their origins and about graphic novels (we will talk more during the semester about the "graphic novel" and whether, as a category, it really suits what we're discussing).

For more about the format of this course, see the links under "course information" to your right!  These links will give you information about assignments, the reading schedule, and--MOST IMPORTANTLY--how and when to post to the blog.