The connection is truly eerie.  The headlines from exactly 100 years before 9/11/2011, were filled with news of McKinley’s assassination. While not as traumatic as the attack on the twin towers, this was a MAJOR event.  And the surrounding history adds to the similarities.  Anarchists and Muslim fundamentalists are far apart in ideology, but their tactics were quite similar– use terror to gain notoriety and recognition of your cause.  McKinley’s assassin was an anarchist, and the movement had become famous over the past couple of decades for spectacular bombings.  Socialists were also on the rise, and the labor unrest they were encouraging terrified those in charge.  Both groups were lead mainly by new immigrants from Europe– foreigners.  As an antidote to the instability that the left was stirring up at the time, the powers that be served up the same imperialism, xenophobia, and reactionary politics that we have become used to over the past 10 years.

(I should point out here that I am pretty weak on this period of American history, so my discussion– informed by Wikipedia and vague memories of a 30 minute lesson in high school– should be taken with several grains of salt.  I was listening to one of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcasts a few weeks ago and he makes a similar comparison to Spiegelman.  It’s show 40 Radical Thoughts if you are interested.  It’s not the main point of the podcast episode, but he provides a good bit of useful information)

Or should we really make much out of the connections that are at first glance so compelling?  In his introduction, Spiegelman questions his easy belief in some of the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 and some of the connections I’ve been playing with here aren’t all that remarkable.  When has the U.S. not been imperialistic?  When have we not been afraid of the current foreigner?  When have we not had reactionary politics?  Certainly, mixed in with all this U.S. right wingery is the opposite.  The American Revolution was anti imperial and did inspire revolutions around the world.  Even with our discussions of border fences, we are an incredibly diverse nation.  The late sixties and early seventies seem pretty cool.

Spiegelman’s use of turn of the century comics seems to me an expression of his love (not sure that he would agree with this word?) and disgust with the U.S.  It’s not some in between feeling.  He feels both powerfully.  Many of the comics that inspire his book are politically backward, but he still loves them.  He transforms them and makes them a part of his own understanding of 9/11.  The front and back covers reflect this the most.  All of these comics characters are the Americans that were in the towers.

Reading the entire book again for the fourth time, I’m still not sure how to use the chapters, but here is what I am thinking:

1. Use Chapters 1, 2, and 6 for the introduction to the course.  6 seems to fit with 1 and 2 as intro material and also complicates the whole combination of words and text part of the equation that McCloud leaves out of his definition.  Last time I also had the class watch the Superheroes Unmasked documentary in the History Channel.  It was helpful to start the class, but it might be more appropriate to begin Watchmen with.
2. Use Chapter 3 with Maus again to explore reader complicity in connection to closure.  I like what I started with my Prezi, but I kind of flubbed it the first time and I think I could improve it.
3. Last time I used Chapter 8 with Jimmy Corrigan, but I think Chapter 4 might be a better fit.  Chris Ware is constantly exploring the connection of the past and future to the present, and parts of McCloud’s discussion on time would work really well.  Maybe another Prezi?
4. Chapter 5 would have worked with Arkham Asylum, but I’m not sure if I’m going to use Arkham again.  We’ll see. Should be easy to connect 5 to many works though.
5. Most of the books I use are black and white, so Chapter 8 on color might be tricky.  Could bring it in for Ware as well or use with Arkham if I include it.
6. I could use Chapter 7 near the end to connect to some of the questions I bring up early in the semester about how we judge the value of individual works.  McCloud’s discussion of the importance of form and idea is particularly strong. Chapter 9 could work at the end too, but I’m not sure it’s necessary?

• Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
• From Hell, Alan Moore
• In the Shadow of no Towers, Art Spiegelman
• Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
• Palestine, Joe Sacco
• Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, Guy Delisle
• Akira (vol. 1), Katsuhiro Otomo
• Incognegro, Mat Johnson
• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
• Black Hole—Charles Burns

Weekly Meetings- 20%
Each week we will meet for an hour and a half.  Be there.  Keep up with the reading.

Blog- 40%
Both of us will keep an online reading journal.  We should both respond at least twice to each work, read each other’s entries, and occasionally comment on each other’s blog.

Paper- 40%
A 7 to 10 page research paper.

Calendar
Week 1
Introduction

Week 2
Understanding Comics

Week 3
In the Shadow of no Towers

Week 4
From Hell

Week 5
From Hell

Week 6
Jimmy Corrigan

Week 7
Jimmy Corrigan

Week 8
Spring Break

Week 9
Akira

Week 10
Akira & Palestine

Week 11
Palestine

Week 12
Pyongyang

Week 13
Incognegro

Week 14
Fun Home

Week 15
Fun Home

Week 16
Black Hole

Persepolis, the movie and the book, does a wonderful job balancing the depiction of the oppressiveness of the Islamic regime and the often normal lives of the people living under that regime.  School girls are made to wear veils, but they make jump ropes out of them and make jokes about their teachers.  Scary bearded men haul in men, women, and children for breaking moral codes but parties occur regularly with dancing and alcohol, children can buy black market tapes of Kim Wilde, and forbidden make up can apparently be found easily.  Political dissenters are jailed and often executed, but a large segment of society still resists the regime.  One of the most powerful pages in the book for me was on 305 where there are 2 contrasting images of the young women in Satrapi’s art school.  One shows them all in the Islamic garb required by the regime.  They are completely covered and look relatively the same.  Not even their hair shows for fear of arousing male desires.  The next image shows these same women in private.  They have fashionable hairdos and clothes, they wear make up, some of them even wear tight low cut tops.  These contrasting images reminded me of something I heard on NPR several years ago.  I don’t remember the details, but it had something to do with the huge market for makeup and very fancy lingerie in Tehran.  The general idea didn’t really startle me.  I know that Iran isn’t as oppressive as how the country is often presented in U.S. media.  But the details are what often surprise me, and it’s these details that are so important to know about, particularly when we are considering attacking a country.

This is not to suggest that because wealthy women in Tehran wear fancy panties that all is fine and good, that somehow the Islamic regime is just a fascade that has little affect on the lives of Iranians.  Of course this isn’t the case.  While remaining skeptical of my ability to weigh the pros and cons of a culture that I know little about, I don’t have a problem condeming the killing of thousands of political dissenters and whipping people for showing a few strands of hair.  That said, McCain’s off the cuff song about bombing Iran makes me ashamed of my country.  That the man who was one of the main contenders for president could make light of what would result in the killing of probably hundreds of thousands of people says something terrible about our country.  And one of those terrible things is that most of us don’t have an understanding of or even the imagination to see that people who live in other countries, even oppressive countries, live lives worth living.  For that reason, Persepolis should be required reading.

I wonder how many Americans know the name Mossadeq.  It seems terribly important that we should know the story of our involvement in ousting him (or the similar Allende story) and supporting the Shah, leading eventually to the Islamic Revolution, but I didn’t know until around 7 years ago.  Iranians can’t help but know the history of U.S. involvement in their country.  I had an Iranian student in a world lit class years ago who made this point very clearly.  She explained once during class that every family she knew had a son, husband, or father that had  been killed most likely by a U.S. manufactured weapon in the Iran Iraq war.  This was during the last few years of Bush when the administration was contemplating attacking Iran.  After class we were talking and in comparison to the hundreds of thousands dead in the Iran Iraq war she said that so many people around the world die because of actions and policies of the U.S. and “two buidlings fall and you think you can do anything.”  At the time, though I agreed with her, her bluntness shocked me.  Her point was simply a statement of fact.

In the middle of Jimmy Corrigan (are there really no page numbers?!!) there is a cut out page with a series of pictures of suburban sprawl.  The pictures are of Waukosha, the depressingly average town where Jimmy visits his father.  To heighten the oppressive ordinariness, Ware makes this page of images into cut out trading cards that sarcastically glamorize the history and beauty of the town.    The pictures are all of parking lots, shopping centers, McDonald’s and Dairy Queens, while the headers on the backs of the cards are ridiculously exaggerated or misleading: “A DECLARATION OF GLORY,” “SILHOUETTE OF HISTORY,” “A SYMPHONY OF COLORS.”  The all caps of the titles are no more out of place than the overblown descriptions that follow.  Each of the descriptions comes off as desparate as they attempt to argue historical  significance and aesthetic beauty.  While the town is signicant in the arc of Jimmy’s narrative, it is otherwise little, normal, unimportant, and ugly.  It lacks the natural beauty of the rural or the impressive scale of the urban.  In Waukosha, white pine and blue spruce have been replaced by asphalt and ugly boxes.  As Richard von Busack suggests, the images  “are as perfectly satirical as they are perfectly accurate.“  Like the rest of the book, the satire doesn’t seem to come out of anger, but rather, a paralyzing sadness.  Each of the descriptions are meant to be a celebration of suburban American culture, but instead they highlight the destruction of the natural world, the genocide of Native Americans, and the emptiness of consumer culture.  MURMURING PINES begins “Once an intraversable field of white pine and blue spruce forestland, this centrally-located plot of real estate was transformd by the City of Waukosha  Planning Commission into an multi-purpose shopping facility for its suburban residents in 1987– and well, the city has just never looked back.”  Anyone who has driven through a suburban area while it’s being built has seen the massive destruction of nature taking place.  And like our tendency to name areas after the Native groups we have displaced or wiped out, Waukosha trading card titles celebrate what they have destroyed.  Reading all the cards makes me think of driving out to my sister’s house in the suburbs of Atlanta.  All the neighborhood names evoke nature or history.  My favorite is Appalachee Heritage.  What in the world does this neighborhood have to do with the nature and history that it evokes?  I went to a real estate site to get this description: “Apalachee Heritage is just 3.5 miles from Highway 316, 5 miles from I-85, and just minutes to the Mall of Georgia and Discover Mills. This is a heavily wooded community bordering the Apalachee River with over 80 acres of natural areas.“  How long do you think this area will be heavily wooded?  The people there need their Home Depots and Chilis.  And then the “undesireables” will start moving into the area to work at these stores and then there will be no wooded areas and then all the people who moved there will move further out to a newly constructed “Cherokee Plantation” or “Whispering Sioux Meadow Farms.”  Did a quick Wikipedia search of Apalachee: “The Apalachee are an Indian tribe that lived in Apalachee Province, Florida, until the tribe was largely destroyed and dispersed in the 18th century. They lived between the Aucilla River and Ochlockonee River, at the head of Apalachee Bay and were first encountered by Spanish explorers in the 16th century. The Apalachee spoke a Muskogean language which is now extinct, documented by letters written in the Spanish Colonial period. There is a small remnant of the tribe living in Louisiana.”  I wonder how often when you look up a tribe that in the first sentence there is the acknowldgement that the tribe was largely destroyed.  I guees I’ve moved away from my initial point, but I guess I’ve made the point of how powerful Ware’s cutesieness can be.

Clever, yes.  But heartbreaking and true.

With pages like this trading card cutout, I have to step back and question my adverse reaction to the cleverness I so often hate.  At worst, the moments of cuteness seem like practice.  When they are directed at some issue, they are as sharp as a knife.  I am reminded of Ben Franklin’s work.  When he rambles on about the various foibles of human weakness as Silence Dogood I chuckle or roll my eyes.  When he mocks European civility in “The Savags of North America” I am stunned.

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

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.

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.