The Graphic Novel

When I first picked up Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth I was both visually drawn to it and repelled by the cleverness on the opening pages.  I am well over half way through now and I’ve been drawn into the story, but it took awhile.  I want to explore why I was so hesitant, and I guess this has more to do with me than it has to do with Ware or his book.

The font, the colors, the design of the cover all seemed familiar to me because of Ware’s work with This American Life and McSweeney’s.  I never subscribed to McSweeney’s (my wife did from the beginning) or read any of Eggers books (I should), but I somewhat cringingly have to put myself in that kinda quirky, younger NPR listener, too-cool-for-school demographic.  And Ware’s style is somehow a part of this and I am drawn to it.  That said, as much as I love Ira Glass and have learned to respect Egger’s ethos, I have always been turned off by the cleverness that often oozes from their work.  On the opening pages of Jimmy Corrigan we find insulting reviews of the work and incredibly complex pictorial charts(?) that I puzzled over briefly then threw up my hands feeling vaguely stupid, but still not caring enough to spend more time.  Flip through a few pages and there are cut outs that only die hard indie hipster arts and crafters will bother with.  Of course Ware did work with a literary magazine that sent one issue in the form of junk mail and another included a comb and deck of cards. Uggggh.

But Eggers and McSweeney’s have done amazing work encouraging young writers.  As smug as Ira Glass is at times, his show presents some of the most compelling stories you will hear on the radio.  And after I got through the first few chapters of Jimmy Corrigan, I have to admit that there is something heartbreaking about his pitiful characters.

But

The question I’ve always had about Maus is why tell the story through animals.  I assumed that this would in some way lessen the impact of the story.  It was millions of people who died in the Holocaust, not mice.  Would making the humans animals fall into stereotypes?  or dehumanize the characters?  Was Spiegelman creating an oversimplified fable?  Was it not just the the idea of animals that was bothering me, but that the story was being told in a comic book?  As soon as I started reading those concerns vanished, but why?

I looked up Maus in the Tropes website that I linked to last week and as the site suggests, In Maus “people are all portrayed as Funny Animals. Except they’re not funny. At all.” As they explain, “Funny Animals” is the use of animals in comics to represent humans.  The animal characters don’t particularly carry the animal’s traits.  I’m not sure exactly what to do with this information, but it does have a name.  But why is this such an effective way to tell this particular story?

I was listening to Slate.com’s Culture Gabfest podcast a few weeks ago and one of the hosts was talking about the power of an animated documentary she had seen recently (can’t remember what it was. . . ).  One of the other hosts also mentioned the animated movie Waltz with Bashir in the conversation.  The gist was that in a documentary or fiction that deals with moments in history the viewer is often skeptical of reenacted footage.  Obvious examples would be bad history channel docs that create high drama scenes with historical characters in costumes.  Even when it’s well done, you know that the scene is a recreation and it’s hard to trust.  Sometimes you need those scenes though.  With an animated version the fact that it’s a reenactment is so obvious and built in that there is no pretending that this is the real thing.  I saw Chicago 10 a couple of years ago, and was impressed.  It combined actual footage plus recently released audio from the Chicago 7 trial with animation over the real courtroom audio.

Still thinking on this.

That Maus won a Pulitzer in 1992 demonstrates that even at the highest level of arts awards, the graphic novel has the recognized potential for greatness that other more accepted art forms have.  That the Pulitzer category was “Special Awards and Citations”  is a reminder that graphic novels aren’t about to get a Pulitzer category.  “Editorial Cartooning” does have a category, but I don’t think that that suggests that in the arts world that cartooning has a similar sort of respect.  Though the Pulitzer for literature is a big deal in the literary world, the prize in general is a journalism award, and that’s why the cartooning category is there.

But does the graphic novel deserve a Pulitzer category?  or a category of some other prestigious arts or literary awards?  Could or should Maus have competed with novels for the pulitzer?  If there was a category would that encourage more writers and artists to create more “literary” graphic novels?  If Maus was typical of the form, I would answer yes to these questions, but at this point Maus seems to stand out, even compared to something like Watchmen.  Or, in other words, Watchmen stands out as a great graphic novel, whereas Maus stands out as a great piece of art.  I’m not sure I’m being fair to Watchmen here, but that’s at least my gut reaction.

I ran across this site on tropes in various forms.  Here’s the entry on Superman.  A lot of the other works are there too.  I think it’s a wiki and it might be helpful to pick up some of the lingo.

• Soviet Superman propaganda not very different from U.S. version
• Superman changes everything (like Dr. Manhattan)
• Why is Superman the narrator
• The iconography of Superman
• How is Superman the same/different
• Smallville’s residents fears
• Different style of art
• Graphic novels should have academic versions with margins for notes!!!
• Luthor still trying to kill Superman, but he’s the good guy
• Fear of Science and technology going too far
• Use of space on the page doesn’t follow 9 box
• Superman buys into oppressive and violent repression
• Fear of surveillance
• London’s reaction to clone
• Superman’s refusal and then acceptance of leadership role
• Great men keeping each other in check- but causing so much destruction
• Reader has to know background of the various superheroes
• America creates super villains to try to stay on top
• World gives up freedom for prosperity
• U.S. and Chile as only holdouts
• Batman represents chaos of humanity
• Humans act reckless when they know they have heroes to save them
• What horrors have to be done to create utopia
• Bloodless revolution around the world
• U.S.S.R. sending aid packages to the U.S.
• Danger of logic/Brainiac
• TaDa rushed ending

Tomorrow we are discussing Superman: Red Son by Mark Millar.  I’ve read the whole thing through once, and my gut reaction is that this was a great idea and there are interesting themes, allusions, techniques throughout, but overall the initial idea is what is impressive about this work and the follow through was so so.

The concept of Superman landing in the Ukraine instead of Kansas is brilliant.  What happens when a “strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.  . . who can change the course of mighty rivers; bend steel in his bare hands; and who, disguised as Clark Kent mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper,fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way” becomes “the champion of the common worker, [who] fights a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact”?  The book does a great job of flipping the propaganda to Communism instead of Capitalism, forcing the reader to recognize that the propaganda was always there.  This is what the book does best, and I will write another post on this after this one.

For me the book rests lazily on this initial idea though.  It feels rushed, the plot, characters, and themes are not nearly as developed as those in Watchmen.  And I feel much more confident about making these criticisms in comparison to a work from the sam genre.  Also, though I was never a comic book reader, I know most of the characters here from movies, cartoons, TV show, and just popular culture in general.  I get at least most of the tropes and allusions here.  The book does bring up many of the same themes as Watchmen, but not nearly at the same level of complexity.  Some of the similar themes– Superman changes everything much as Dr. Manhattan does, a distrust of any authority or technology that does not consider human flaws and strengths, what horrors have to be done to create a utopia, etc.  The book deals with some of these in a serious way, and I will explore at least one example in another post, but most of the time there might be a page or two devoted.  Suddenly Braniac is on the scene and he occasionally reminds us that logic isn’t always the accptable answer.  Suddenly Batman appears to show the innate human aversion to authority.

I don’t feel for the characters either like I did in Watchmen.  Rorschach is an incredibly sympathetic character, particularly as he martyrs himself to a cause that might very well ruin the utopia that Ozzymandius has perhaps created.  Dan and Laurie’s feelings of impotence is totally believeable even though we know they dress up in silly costumes. Millar’s Superman sets up characters and relationships that could evoke powerful emotion, but in the end they fall flat.  I don’t care too much that Wonder Woman loses her powers trying to save Superman or that Batman is willing to spare the man who killed his parents in order to stop Superman.  I could have cared though, but too much was crammed in to this fairly short work.

As I was finishing up reading Watchmen for the second time, one of the things that I kept going back to was the fact that Dan and Laurie are the only two copycat masked heroes in the book. I’m not sure what to make of it, though it does seem an important point. The two of them seem the most “human.” They are less damaged and damaging than the rest of the characters. But they also seem the least effective as well. They aren’t blameless or perfect. They participate in the ugly crowd control scenes even though they are a bit squeamish about it. They seem to be able to do some good when their activities are small scale. The fire rescue seems an example of this. But what about the jailbreak. They don’t seem to do much harm there, but. . . ? It is a subversive act (against the government as opposed to for it). The nastiness of the heores seems to come out most when they work for the government or try to tackle ultimate problems.

Dan and Laurie (along withe the earlier versions) also seem to be the most nostalgic about their time as heroes, though also the most reluctant in their claiming the hero identity. They both poopoo the old days, but yearn for them at the same time. Despite insisting that his days as a hero were childish, Dan feels impotent in the face of the coming apocalypse, and this results in real impotence with Laurie. Laurie always claims that her mother made her become a hero, but she always keeps her old costume near. They both wander around the owl nest when they think no one is watching them. The early fight scene with the gang excites the two of them and they are only able to get it on after they dress up and save some people from a fire. The other characters don’t seem all that nostalgic, though I guess that’s pretty obvious because they are all working or dead.

Moore clearly wants us to be thinking about nostalgia with Ozymandius’s perfume. Throughout the scene on Mars, as Laurie learns that her father is the Comedian and John decides to go back to earth (I wouldn’t call him nostalgic though) the reader sees the Nostalgia bottle tumbling to the ground, spilling, and eventually breaking. I’m not sure exactly how to interpret this. Cleary, nostalgia has broken, but I’m not sure if we are to tie all the threads of nostalgia together or to just apply this to Laurie. I think not, but I’m not sure I fully understand the implications.