Comics in the News

Just saw article about Health Care Reform 'comic' and wanted to remember to share it:

http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2011/10/health-reform-comic-book/

Alice Hoffman: an amazing person

I was really awed and inspired by Alice Hoffman’s brief speech and reading at the Terrace Room last week. She is a truly fascinating person with wonderful advice and insights for younger readers and writers. I was really amazed when she said that she had almost dropped out of high school; sometimes I forget that not all “successful” people were on the path to succeed throughout their whole lives. She has certainly come a long way from where she started out, in terms of her education and her appreciation for learning. It’s so interesting how people’s lives can take such strange twists and turns and end up in very different directions from where they began.

I was also fascinated by what Hoffman said about the development of writers. She commented at one point that the books that you read as a child and as a young adult really affect you and your writing style, that those authors and stories manifest themselves in your own writing. To me, this seems both incredibly obvious and remarkably insightful. On the one hand, of course your past reading will affect your present writing; it seems natural that your writing would be influenced by other writers whom you had previously read. On the other hand, I would never independently think of myself and of my own writing style as a composite of those authors that I had read before and that had really resonated with me. I would be more inclined to think of myself as a trailblazer, creating a writing style that was uniquely my own. And yet, how can one really do that if one has absorbed so much writing previously and has reflected on other authors? One must necessarily be shaped by those other stories that had moved one in a certain way. And as I reflect on this topic, I remember a perfect example from my own life of the influence of writers on my writing. At one point two years ago, I let my best friend read a few pages of my journal, because there was something in it pertaining to her that I thought she would find amusing. Her reaction after reading it? “Wow, your journal sounds just like a Jane Austen novel.” I think, with that realization having now hit me, I’ll have to agree with Alice Hoffman on this question, and concede that no matter how independent I may think my writing is, I am indeed affected by other writers whom I admire.

Another comment that Hoffman made about developing writers was that there’s a fine line between being a reader and being a writer. She stated the difference quite clearly, as a cause-and-effect situation: “You become a writer when there’s a book that you want to read and you realize that it hasn’t been written yet.” I thought that this was a fantastic way of summing up the reader/writer relationship. It seems to accurately reflect the transition of many people into writers. Hoffman also stated that becoming a writer isn’t a choice—you do it because you have to tell stories. I was also interested by this comment; clearly, for Hoffman herself, the process of becoming a writer wasn’t really an intentional development, it was more of a necessary change in her life. I think it’s great that she felt compelled to tell stories for a living, stories that hadn’t been told before, and that that’s why she became an author. I look forward to reading some of those stories sometime. Maybe they will then become manifested in my storytelling, as the cycle goes.

Free figure draqing class

Sacco's Lens

Safe Area Gorazde was one of the most stunning and difficult novels I’ve ever read. Sacco’s immaculate art emphasized the already jaw-dropping narrative, and oftentimes made it hard to stomach- to accept that any of this happened outside the world of these imaginative, and yet realistic drawings. Sacco inserts himself in the story as an outsider. Not only is he from a foreign country with the special privilege of escape from Gorazde, but also he looks different from the other characters. To me, his appearance was more comic –like than the other characters. I think Sacco did this intentionally to separate himself from the narratives of the other characters. Perhaps he would have completely removed himself from the story had he not played such a large role in gathering the survivors’ tales. With a less realistic appearance in the graphic novel, Sacco shows that he does not consider himself worthy of the realism in other characters; that is, he has not suffered through the awful trials. Sacco is self-conscious of his role as visitor. We’ve discussed in class how people who have a talent for telling stories have a duty to communicate the stories of others that need to be told. This novel is the greatest example of this, so far, I think. Bosnia’s war contained so much tragedy and horrendous human behavior. At one instance, the story begs to be told so humanity can prevent similar events in the future while there is a strong desire to forget it all and move forward. On pages 160 and 161, Sacco specifically asks if the Muslims and other victims live again in peace with the Serbs. The summary of the pages seems to be that the events can never be forgotten, and yet there is not a strong willingness to forgive… and so remains the threat of reprisals and never-ending conflict.

Sacco tells the story so well, especially in his portrayal of human faces. I could see the deep sadness and pure exhaustion in the eyes of the characters and felt for their every experience, even though I had known very little about the Bosnian war before I started to read. In fact, I knew only the figures-of death tolls and who caused the conflict and how the United States reacted. Reading this graphic novel made me feel like I visited the country and traveled with Joe Sacco to see the devastation. His role as narrator makes the story more personal, as if Sacco invited the reader on this journey with him. He makes jokes to the reader in the boxes of narration out of sight of the characters within the story, as if we’ve earned the special privilege of personal anecdotes from Sacco. Sometimes Sacco is talking in word bubbles while narrating alongside in larger word boxes. This shows his style self-conscious story telling. He accepts the lighthearted nature of the people in Gorazde all too easily, and admits that he has accepted it all too easily. Sacco comments on the behavior of journalists including him, who drop in at the end of a conflict and encounter tragic experiences through others. They can enjoy the relative safety of a post-conflict region while feeling important to the people and to the world as a conduit of essential news. However, Sacco and his joking nature disappear during the extremely graphic parts of the story, in which the survivors completely take over their narrative. In some sections, the narrative of the survivors occupies word bubbles as well as text boxes, as Sacco allows them to take over his narrative style and the narrative itself. Just as intentionally as Sacco put himself into the story, he takes himself out. In this way he acknowledges the importance of the characters instead of the journalists. Just as the Blue Road is an unreliable route to the outside world, Sacco is not a completely flawless storyteller. The way out of Gorazde is never easy. Residents of the town must trust Sacco and other outsiders to bring things as inconsequential as blue jeans back to them, but they must also trust the journalists to export their stories. If not an actual survivor, the narrator of any tragedy is so important because they are telling the story from their lens. They did not experience the tragedy firsthand, and yet they will spread news of the experiences through the world. Sacco does this in a self-conscious manner that works, inviting his own attitudes as extraneous pieces of narration while the truly impactful pieces of the story lie in the hands of those people have survived the Bosnian war.

Sacco in Safe Area Gorazde

I found Safe Area Gorazde very interesting and highly disturbing. The stories told by Sacco reveal the true brutality of the Bosnian war, in which neighbors burned down each other’s homes and committed other unthinkable atrocities. It was somewhat surreal to see the cartoon version of Sacco himself among the Bosnian victims; he seemed slightly out of place in their destroyed country. It also seemed strange to me that Sacco was in such a dangerous war zone, but I guess that’s the job of a war journalist. As for the question of why Sacco would draw himself into the book, my main theory is that he wanted to tell the story of his trip to Bosnia as accurately as possible. We know of Sacco that he only included direct quotes from people, refusing to paraphrase any dialogue for the book. This decision indicates his desire for complete accuracy; he clearly didn’t want any of his book to seem fictional or invented. It therefore seems natural that Sacco would want to include himself in the narrative, because that choice reflects the truest representation of his trip to Bosnia. Obviously Sacco himself was present while listening to people’s stories of the war and learning about Bosnian history, so for him to leave himself out of the narrative would involve a slight distortion of fact. As a result, he chose to include himself in order to demonstrate to the reader the events of the narrative in the most complete, accurate way possible.

My other reflection on Sacco’s decision to draw himself into the story is that he wanted to give his readers a main character/narrator to identify with as he charted the dangerous territory of the Bosnian war. I think Sacco realized that many American readers would feel lost in a story about a war in a foreign country that they had never visited, and thus he chose to present himself within the narrative in order to provide some consistency and familiarity in the story. It seemed that he wanted readers to be able to identify with him as both narrator and main character, hoping that this would create a recognizable element in an otherwise jarring book. One thing that I observed while reading is that Sacco draws himself as much less realistic and much more cartoony than the other characters, which (if we look back to Scott McCloud) suggests that Sacco wanted readers to be able to identify with his less specific, more general representation of himself. While all of his other characters had very specific features, Sacco just looks like a short guy with glasses and big lips. And sure, that description doesn’t fit all possible readers, but it applies to more people than a very detailed drawing would. So I felt that Sacco wanted to draw in his readers by drawing himself as he explored the horrifying world of Bosnia, bringing them into the narrative by showing his own experience and hoping that they would identify with it.

First Person Safe Area Gorazde

I thought it was very interesting the question Adam posed to us for this blog post: Why does Sacco insert himself into the story of others? Why does he make himself into a co-subject?

Lately, I have been reading about (and watching) the American autobiographical documentary film—that is, a first-person narrative that takes the filmmaker’s family as its subject as it explores issues of family secrets and dynamics. In it, the filmmaker’s character is always built in relation to another family member. And something which I read recently stated that the autobiographical film was the new literary memoir. Could SAFE AREA GORAZDE be considered a journalistic memoir? When and why did literary memoirs start to take hold in a history of literature?

I was excited by this statement because of all that I don’t know but also because of the possibility that there might be larger, transdisciplinary developments of Thought that influence creative work across the gamut of all the creative fields. I’m almost certain there’s something called post-modernism that might be related to this move towards an embrace of complete subjectivity as a way towards Real Truth, given that in our times, we have generally given up on any pretense of Objectivity as being a plausible enterprise in documenting or relaying some kind of Real Truth.

When I think of what Sacco did, inserting himself amidst the people, and by his own self-referential reference to those journalists who went around throwing bon bons at the kids on the street, the role of the participant-observer that comes to us from the discipline of Anthropology comes to mind. They have made it part of what they do to admit the fact that their observation affects what is being observed. On the other hand, documentary film has had an on-and-off relationship with this “coming clean,” or insertion of the character of filmmaker into the film. During the most fervent period of documentary filmmaking in the 1960’s and 70’s, American documentary filmmakers were making “direct cinema” or telling stories from a fly-on-the-wall, observatory mode, while ethnographers-cum-documentary filmmakers in France were practicing a “cinema verite,” which was all about using the film camera and the filmmakers’ presence as a catalyst for what then occurred in front of the camera. I sense that the reason Joe Sacco inserts himself into his story has something to do on a macro level with this idea that authors or auteurs are generally moving towards a personal, first-person approach in order to get closer to Truth, a rule of Subjectivity over Objectivity, and that this is a phenomenon that has theoretical foundings and can be seen across disciplines and creative media. So I’m very curious about this.

Now on a specific level, I think that Sacco’s decision to speak about such a heavy topic as the war in Eastern Bosnia in the first person is a good storytelling device. It humanizes the tragedy and personalizes it for readers who share the same position of “outsider” as Sacco himself. The chapter that really did it for me was AMERICA MAN (pp. 190-192) when Sacco admits, “I wanted to put a hundred thousand miles between me and Bosnia…between me and these horrible, disgusting people and their fucking wars and pathetic prospects…” In a first-person voice, Sacco shows himself as a human. Just like Spiegelman, Sacco is not perfect and he is honest about it, which is a really effective way to deal with topics of inhumanity. History textbooks have always been hard for me because it’s always a listing of names, geographical locations, and dates. In SAFE AREA GORAZDE, it’s about Sacco’s relationship to these people that tell us something about the people, and not their testimonies alone. As a work of journalism, I understand why Sacco decided to structure his novel moving between first-person voice of the people and their daily life and testimonies of eye-witnesses and an official narrator in the black pages. Using his personal experience as his main structure, he is then free to "flashback" to give us historical information--the first-person serves to draw us into the story almost so that we might be able to digest the black-bordered, informational chapter and gives it a real texture and complexity--it's humanity.

Including Sacco

On the very first page of Safe Area Gorazde, I found identifying the individual members of “we” to be very difficult because of the vague description of the scene that was presented to me. I saw a man who had wrinkles on his forehead, saying “I think things will get much better,” and a second man with Harry Potter glasses whose prescription is so bad that the thickness of the lenses conceal his eyes. Which one was Joe Sacco? Edin? (Am I the only one who was confused?) How ironic... considering the immense amount of detail that exists in this graphic novel. Of course, soon I was saved by page 5, where Joe Sacco’s identity is revealed, and it soon became apparent to me that Joe Sacco was very, very distinct. In fact, in contrast to Maus and Laika, the huge amount of details that Joe Sacco included in his graphic novel helped to easily distinguish everyone’s faces, most of which are unique and discernible. Joe Sacco--to me, at least--had a much more comical appearance in comparison to the people around him. I think that Joe Sacco wanted his presence to be noticed by his readers, perhaps to take a part in a different form of journalism in which the reporter/journalist inserts him/herself into the subject’s narrative.

Do we frequently see journalists interacting with their subjects? How often do journalists directly interact with them? In the limited number of visual news reports that I have seen, the reporter usually speaks into the camera and presents the scene before us. The reporter, after s/he has finished introducing the topic that applies to the place at which the reporter is located, is followed by aspect-to-aspect montage of shots as the reporter continues the story. Even interviews with inhabitants of the story’s location or innocent participants in and witnesses of the story exclude the reporter’s appearance, revealing only the reporter’s hand wrapped around a microphone. It would be a rare occurrence even to see the reporter’s entire self included in an interview with a random pedestrian, but that short glimpse of the reporter would be the only and smallest instance of the storyteller interacting with the story. Many written news reports are told in a storytelling but strictly objective fashion, completely excluding the storyteller from the story. Of course, there are Q&As, but the Qs don’t do anything to reveal the interviewer behind them. Ultimately, beyond including a name after the phrases Written by or Interviewed by, journalism seems to hide the journalist, perhaps to increase the amount of its stories’ objectivity that it presents to the highest extent. Directly including the journalist poses the risk of losing objectivity. The journalist would appear to be too invested in his/her story, which, as a result, would appear to be too opinionated for those who listen to it. People expect journalism to be objective. They want to learn the cold and hard facts behind the story... How can a journalist ever involve himself if he wanted to avoid jeopardizing his report of those cold and hard facts?

However, Joe Sacco obviously sees and envisions differently, mainly because he approaches his journalism in a different--though not particularly unique--way. His graphic novel Safe Area Gorazde has a strong resemblance to Exit Through the Gift Shop, in which the storyteller (and narrator) of the documentary is an important character in the story. I don’t know how Sacco planned to tell his story when he began his excursions in Bosnia. (If he usually includes himself in his graphic novels, then I guess that his plan is obvious.) However, it is easy to tell that the comical appearance that he gives to himself indicates his deliberate choice in making his graphic novel into a mix of a personal documentary and a journalist’s news report. Sacco wanted his appearance to be obvious; he wanted his readers to notice him when he entered the scene. He isn’t narcissistic... He was just trying to make a point about his presence in Bosnia. He wanted to show that he was directly involved in his story because the story about the war in Eastern Bosnia was told by people with whom he interacted. His main source material wasn’t only interviews. His source material also came from his emotional investment in his friends and interviewees who were more separated from him. In fact, Sacco says, “They had to love me in Gorazde. They had to want me... I was movement” (65) when he discusses his ability to go into and come out of Gorazde via the Blue Road. Strongly indicated by Sacco’s reaction to the French’s brief stint of restricting access into Gorazde, during which Sacco worriedly expressed, “I was wondering about Edin, Riki, the silly girls. If I was no longer movement, where did they stand?” (66), his emotional involvement even increased as his time in Bosnia progressed. It is quite undeniable that Sacco became invested in the story of the Bosnian War and how it affected those in Gorazde. Witnessing his many interactions in Gorazde forced me to assume that he felt compelled to include himself because his presence--his investment--was how he got his story.

Now.. don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to say that Sacco wanted to tell the story of the war in Eastern Bosnia from a strictly subjective standpoint. Sacco still approached the story in an objective way, using research and the interviews that he gained from Bosnians and even placing quotation marks inside the narrative boxes to perhaps indicate that the narration was sourced from an interview. However, including his presence in Bosnia as he interviewed and learned from those around him raises an interesting question on objectivity and subjectivity. Are they exclusive?

The detail is scary good.

In Safe Area Gorazde Sacco manages to illustrate the wartorn Bosnian city of Gorazde with such mystifying detail that a reader--any reader--could point to his inky pages and find a reason to call bull. No doubt, the illustration in this masterpiece (there! I said it) of American journalism lends the whole experience of reading a whole other gravity. Sacco's ink, which hovers somewhere between photorealism and woodcut, made me continually wary of the threat that one of his subjects might jump out of the page matter-of-factly and into my lap with a good-natured wink. What about the work gives me the creeps? Am I nervous about the stability of my world? Am I afraid that Sacco's interviewees are actually real people?

Of course I am. And of course they are. So far, we've covered a lot of comics ground. We've done historical graphic non-fiction, graphic novels, graphic allegory, and other graphic works, and yet this is the only one we've covered that has made me really question the stability of the world around me. I think this is precisely because of the way in which Sacco manages the visual. That comment about one of his refugees jumping out into my lap? I meant it. They're so scary real that they seem more believable--they seem somehow more voluminous, more flesh-and-blood than all of the other people we've had the opportunity to meet so far.

I think that Sacco's realism is tied deeply and dispassionately to the incredibly difficult demand for objectivity under which the journalist works. During the first world war, there arose this really interesting segment of poets whose work--much like Sacco's--was an artistic attempt to capture the reality of trench warfare for the eager, house arrested general population. In England, this poetry was so prolifically produced that publisher began to call the young soldier poets "Trench Poets" and their poetry "Trench Poetry." These young men had grown up in a period in which they were all given a good, humanist education, and so many were well read and most could express themselves through poetry with relative ease. I am not suggesting that these poets had it "easy," but they certainly knew how to write and write they did.

I bring the Trench Poets up because I think they function as an interesting analogue to the ways in which media evolves to meet the needs of the hungry public. Poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Wilfred Owen made poetry into reportage: they were able to capture something about the war that "journalism" or "reportage" of the traditional variety could't. Sacco's Safe Area marks an 80 year gap between the Great War of the 1910s and the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s. His work, however, has the potential to be more dynamic in a couple of very interesting ways.

The capacity of visual grammar to express with relative ease ideas with which poetry or prose struggle signals the ever-growing need for the medium in areas traditionally belonging to the journalist, the scholar, the average global citizen. That Sacco's work comes entirely from taped conversations he had with people actually living in the devastated region lends the pictorial element of the work more authority. That we are almost certain he works from photographs heightens our esteem for the project he undertook.

I think people will look back and see that this medium shook the shit out of people, changed the ways people thought about reportage, and redefined an entire profession.

-Kyle O

Alice Hoffman: “Write What You Feel”

Not being a writer myself and having limited background in the art of creative writing, I thought it was a fantastic opportunity to see Alice Hoffman and learn more about her own approach to writing. Although I haven’t had time to read her recent adult novels, her teen book Green Angel was one of my favorite stories when I was younger. Needless to say, I learned much more about Alice Hoffman and writing in one hour than I expected.

One of the points that really stuck with me from her presentation was her adage: “You don’t need to just stick to writing what you know. You just need to write what you feel.” Although the message may seem obvious to many people, I found this especially enlightening because I was always told in my writing classes (at least in high school) that the best forms of writing are based on what you know. Thus, I became an expert at non-fiction writing because I was always writing from experience, and I believed that the only way my “voice” could come through to the page was to base my writing on tried and true experiences. This explained why I was never able to finish a lot of the short stories I started when I was younger because they were all fiction, and my imagination never seemed to live up to my ambitions. I’ve always admired fiction writers not only for their storytelling abilities, but also for their seemingly endless imagination. However, with a simple statement, Ms. Hoffman opened up another dimension in writing that I didn’t realize before. She explained that knowing how something feels is transferable to the characters in a story and brings out her voice. She described herself as an “escapist writer” who wants to escape from what they know rather than writing what they know; in this way, I think that writing about what you feel acts as a bridge from writing non-fiction to fiction. Ms. Hoffman also stated that this also explains why Wuthering Heights is one of her favorite novels because she believed that for Bronte to be able to write the story she did, Bronte must have been able to really feel the emotions she put her characters through, and in turn, Ms. Hoffman was able to feel those same emotions.

Ms. Hoffman’s preference for Wuthering Heights also points to her emphasis and interest in women’s issues and women’s knowledge, which she says is not always known because women in certain cultures don’t share the wisdom that they have. Her recent book, The Dovekeepers, highlights this by focusing on the voices of four different women and their journeys.

The part of the presentation that connected to this class was when she discussed the extensive research she had to do to write her teen book, Incantation, where she had to learn about the Spanish Inquisition. She stated that when she was in school, she never learned about this topic at all and she believes that if you don’t teach history, you won’t know history, which is true, especially with my own experience with Safe Area Gorazde. In high school, the Bosnian conflict was never touched upon when I was learning world history and I have not taken a class on the conflict in college, even though it is such an important part of world history and international relations and politics. My first brief exposure was through my study abroad program in Oxford, where I learned about England’s participation (or lack of) regarding the conflict. Sacco’s graphic novel and Ms. Hoffman’s on comment on historical knowledge and representation really made me concerned about the way history is taught and the subject(s) that are not even touched upon in high school and college especially since history can tell us so much about the present and the future. Right now, Ms. Hoffman is trying to learn about her own history, her family history, through research on her own grandfather’s book about his life and immigrant experience in order to prepare for her new book.

Overall, I really enjoyed listening to Ms. Hoffman’s presentation. She was humorous, witty, and obviously talented. Plus, I’m starting to learn a new way to write.

Joe Sacco: From a True Journalist’s Perspective

Having read Maus, I felt that I was better able to better understand the stylistic and storytelling techniques Sacco employed in Safe Area Gorazde. Spiegelman’s and Sacco’s approach to very serious events and often very horrifying scenes in world history are distinct and both are effective and provoking in their own ways. I think that the combination of the clarity and interaction of the words and images with his deliberate insertion of himself into this story brings this work to another level, in both a journalistic and graphic art sense. Rather than perpetuating the gap between readers (especially long-distance readers) through conventional journalistic techniques, which more often than not desensitize readers to important events occurring abroad, Sacco’s decision to insert himself into his art allows him to combat the sense of detachment and bring his stories to readers in a way that allows them to understand his message on a much deeper level.

Sacco has a different relationship with his characters and a different purpose with his story than Spiegelman does in Maus because although he gets personally invested in his research, he is also a journalist. Thus, through his artwork, Sacco does not only want his readers to understand the story and history and feel the emotions of the characters, he also wants his readers to experience what he and his “characters” see and feel as if they are right there when each event occurs. I believe this is why Sacco has placed so much time and effort into the detail and accuracy of the artwork, whether they are sceneries or people’s expressions. For example, on the 2-page splash on pages 14-15, one can see the clearness of the war-torn homes and the overall destruction through the intricateness of Sacco’s art; details that are not as needed in Maus where the focus was on the story of the Holocaust itself and the relationship between Spiegelman and his father. The thinness of the lines composing these scenes give off a photographic quality that adds to the accuracy Sacco is trying to capture (33). In addition, instead of having his characters wear masks, Sacco also spends a lot of time on facial expressions and shadowing. The panels on the second tier of page 129, especially the perspective, allows readers to see exactly what Sacco sees as he interviews the young woman, and he gives them the opportunity to really catch all the emotions going across her face as she explains her situation.

A more obvious example that may allow us to understand why Sacco chose to seemingly contradict his journalistic commitment to objectivity can be seen on pages 130-131, where Sacco offers a brief look into how other international journalists have approached the situation in Gorazde and they manner in which they reported what was going on. Sacco’s description of how these journalists operate highlights the detachment that seems to accompany journalistic objectivity. Sacco seems to argue that this approach downplays the importance of the Bosnian conflict and the tragedies that these people are facing. He hints at this several times, quoting President Bill Clinton and U.N. officials who state that news media have been underemphasizing (or denying) the level of destruction upon the Bosnian Muslims and Gorazde in general. I believe that Sacco is trying a different journalistic approach using art and text to provoke the emotions of readers to make them really try to understand the pain, fear, anxiety, loss, hope and hopelessness these people experienced and this becomes really effective as Sacco allows readers to step into his shoes. Yet he is still committed to his research, as pages 160-161 illustrates, as Sacco records how different people feel about living with the Serbs again. Moreover, in drawing himself, Sacco distinguishes himself from the his story by adding a more cartoonish feel to his own representation (8-11, 104) compared to his more realistic representation of his “characters” (155). In addition, by making himself a co-subject in addition to the accuracy and poignancy of his artwork and text, Sacco is able to add another level of depth similar to Spiegelman’s choice to also focus on his relationship with his dad. Sacco implicitly tells readers why he focuses more on certain people than others, and illustrates the limits of his scope (in interviews), which only strengthens the connection between readers to the story rather than desensitizing them and pushing them away.

Final Words: I must admit, the stylistic choices that Sacco made for Safe Area Gorazde had quite an affect on me. It was so painful to read and many times, I had to force myself to tear my eyes away from the pages because they were too difficult and horrifying to look at. The detail and precision jumps out at me and I became just as invested as Sacco was in these stories, these lives. Although the chronology can be disconcerting sometimes, I understood the message and the injustice of what Sacco was trying to say regarding the conduct and politics surrounding the U.N. and the Dayton Peace Treaty. I was shocked, I was hurt, and I was angry at how history always seems to be repeating itself and because I was painfully reminded that life isn’t fair. What still surprises me about historical memory is how easily people forget because life must go on.

My (currently unknown) Family History

How would I go about constructing my family history? In many ways I almost consider the Spiegelmans luckier in this regard. Art had Vladek in his life: his father was a Polish Jew who went through a horrible but complex and intriguing life struggle that was so traumatizing he is able to remember even minor details. I don’t have that luxury (for lack of a better word; of course going through the Holocaust was in no way a luxury). My ancestry is muddled and murky, and my family members are scattered and often withhold information.

Or am I just lazy? I have a vague idea of my ancestry, going back to around the generation of my great-grandparents. But I must admit, I am a bit intimidated by my Caribbean relatives (I am Haitian on my mother’s side and Jamaican on my father’s). They all have huge personalities, and many of them speak (or shout, it’s often hard to tell the difference) in Creole, which I can’t understand. But I’ve never really made an effort. My grandmother on my mother’s side is full of information, I’m sure of it, but she is steadily slipping into senility. Also, stories from my mom of her being highly emotional and irrational have implanted in me an almost instinctual desire to never get to close (emotionally and physically) to her. That is ridiculous though. I am her grandson, and she clearly adores me (as most grandparents do). She gives me gifts (small, but heartfelt) at every opportunity she has and she constantly brags to her friends about even my smallest successes. I need to just do it. I need to go over and just ask her to tell me her story. Maybe I’m in my Art-pre-Maus-writing stage except in my case I haven’t been estranged from my father for two years, I’ve been estranged from my older relatives pretty much my entire life. I can totally do it though….

With regard to how I would tell the story, were I to ever retrieve it, I am still pretty unsure. I’m not very artistically talented so I’m pretty sure a comic is out of the question. And I don’t know if I would be committed enough to a novel or memoir or something. But I love poetry. And I love pictures. Maybe I could connect the two somehow…a kind of epic poem with photographic illustrations (?). Hmm…that might actually be pretty cool.

Family History: Interpreting the Past from the Confines of the Present

What I found endlessly fascinating about MAUS was Spiegelman’s reflexive storytelling structure. This did not merely extend to a reflexivity of the act of authoring the comic, but reflexive of the act of digging into the past, the act of remembering, but most importantly, the act of subjectively interpreting the past within the context of the present—which is essentially what history is. Spiegelman could have chosen to represent his father’s story strictly from a detached, third-person perspective, but that would have spared it of the utter complexity afforded by the meta-structure of his father non-chronological dropping into and out of the past, which is representative of the workings of memory, as well as his complete inability to deal with his relationship to his father in the present, much less the past. This issue of documenting on film my family history through my grandma’s story—she is my only surviving grandparent who also helped raise me—has been a harrowing task that I have been involved in for the past 6 years. Naturally, my document would take the form of a documentary film and I think I would have to go about it through the clouded lens of my own inability to understand. In that sense, I think the resulting film would speak to my own act of digging, as well as drift between past and present—with the present constantly moving through my experience in China and towards my grandmother’s impending death.

Since 2005, I have been documenting my grandmother on video. It started out as a filmed interview assignment for a documentary film production course I was taking at UCLA. In the resulting 5-minute video piece, what started out as a didactic episode where my grandma broke down the radical components of the Chinese character for “restraint” or “yielding”—the character is comprised of the character “knife tip” over the character for “heart”—to teach me that the act of exercising restraint was like pressing a knife tip into your heart quickly escalated to an bout of emotionality triggered by a phone call from my mother about how I need to be more compassionate towards my own mother. By “teaching” me the composition of the Chinese character—arguably the foundation of ancient Chinese culture which revolves around the written word—my grandma touched upon traditional Chinese concepts of how “to comport oneself as a human in relation to others.” This represented the past, and then a phone call brought her from macro concept of ancient Chinese history to the micro-sphere of the relationship between my grandmother, my mother, and I. Her emotional outburst said a lot about the meaning of family to a little old Chinese lady and for me, spoke about how older values are at risk of defaulting within modern-day relationships or when these relationships occur across cultures.

Years later, when I started filming my grandmother again, on a return visit to California—I had been living for the past 3 years in Beijing, China—I dug up old outtakes of that first video project with my grandmother. In one instance, she had actually prepared notes for telling me about her past. She sat there giving me her rendition of an “official history” of her life, and my voice behind the camera was painfully impatient. In another scene, I decide to try and teach my grandma English since it was her lifelong gripe that I had never had the patience to teach her. Looking back on the video footage, I was horrified at my sharpness, my impatience, my worldliness and my inability to listen or to understand.

The year I viewed those outtakes, I came back to Cupertino, CA with the express purpose of entering my grandma’s world, slowing myself down to her pace of living. I spent two months in her studio apartment at the Sunny View Retirement Home and I slowed my pace to match hers. This effort resulted in a feature-length film about my grandma’s losing control over her hoarded clothing collection and also my grandmother, mother and my slowly coming to terms with Grandma’s aging process. Later, I completed a third film project on my grandmother, a short black comedy documentary about my grandma’s misadventures with her three elegant, middle-aged overseas Chinese daughters trying to buy grandma’s burial shroud in mainland China. Still, these projects received criticism because of my leaving out of my grandmother’s biographical background—her experience during the Japanese Occupation of China and her experience fleeing to Taiwan on the Eve of the Communist Liberation of China. And so I struggled deeply, trying to find a way to understand her history—but I had language barriers—I couldn’t understand the Chinese that was used to describe these historical events and historical locations—and I hadn’t done the requisite historical research.

Once I knew I was planning to leave China, I took a month-long trip with my video camera to China’s Hunan Province, the place of my grandma’s birth, to meet her surviving relatives—her nieces and nephews—and spent all my time documenting the prideful way in which they wanted to represent our family history from before my grandma left China through the terrible experiences of the family under the hands of the Communists—and some of which came as a direct result of my grandma’s status. I got some historical information, but mostly was overwhelmed with how they wanted to represent our family to me in my status as an American-born relative. Since returning to California, my grandma has been ill with kidney failure. My aunt from Taiwan has come recently to try and forcefully place my grandmother on dialysis and now there are issues that I am filming about what grandma’s true will is—and the complexity and cultural propriety of asking an elderly Chinese woman whether or not she wants the choice to live or die—all of which I am faithfully documenting. These are all asides, all digressions from an ever-elusive, detached, third-person perspective of my family history, so I think that inevitably the film that I will make one day about my family history will bear much in common with Spiegelman’s efforts in MAUS. It will involve this search, the fundamental inadequacy of a person of a latter generation to enter into the life experience of one who went before and the complexity of the present acting on one’s interpretation of the past.

Family

I’d like to start off my post with a small confession: I admit that while reading Maus, especially Maus II, I was far more interested in the concentration camp stories than in Art’s present-day interactions with his father. Maybe it’s because I found Vladek Spiegelman far less annoying in the past than in the present, or because I got tired of reading about his arguments with Art on every other page, but at one point I realized that even though Vladek’s experiences in the Holocaust were sometimes terrifying to read about, I still enjoyed those scenes more than Art’s experiences with his father. I think this reaction is probably a result of my lack of empathy for Art in his struggle to become acquainted with his father. Surprising as it may be, I actually have very close relationships with both of my parents. And I’ve been close to them for a long time. I somehow missed the stage of parental hatred/daughter rebellion during my period of teenage angst, and since I have no reason to dislike either of my parents aside from the expected generational differences, I really love them both and am rarely (if ever) as annoyed by them as Art was by Vladek. So, I can’t empathize with Art. I can sympathize with him, since Vladek is pretty annoying and I wouldn’t like having him as a father in his old age, but I just don’t have the parental tension going on in my own life. For some reason I felt that this was a necessary fact to declare. Perhaps because some of my other classmates are contemplating their own family histories, and I find that those are so different from my own.

Another confession: I really can’t decide what family story I would want to write about. I’ve brainstormed a few but none seem to fit. The most compelling one for me is my mom’s biography, not because she has accomplished anything that would seem incredible to anyone else, but because I think she has had a fascinating life that is worth hearing about. She was born in California, grew up here in the Bay Area, went to college in the early 1970’s and experienced all of the craziness of the hippie era, then moved to Washington, DC and started working on Capitol Hill as a press secretary for various congressmen. Then it gets slightly less interesting when she moves back to journalism (her original career track), but in the meantime she’s also writing a book, having kids, and experiencing the struggle of raising a family. I don’t think that this would be a compelling story for many people to read, so I probably wouldn’t tell it like a traditional story (ie in written form). I would probably focus on her younger life, when she was in college and then working on the Hill, and I might end with her marriage (which seems like an oh-so-traditional narrative arc, but it just fits so well). Thinking about the 70’s, I really want to turn the story into a large, colorful painting, because that’s how I often envision that era: like a giant blur of bright images. I feel like I could convey many different events on one canvas, and I could more easily evoke the feelings and atmosphere of the 70’s in painting. But if I were to attempt to tell my mom’s whole story from, say, 1970-1983 (encompassing her life from the beginning of college to her marriage), then I might go for a more comprehensive medium. Painting seems too ambiguous and too instantaneous to convey a story that long and involved. In that circumstance, I would probably create a graphic narrative to tell her story. Writing it out in prose just seems too boring, since I can think of so many great images that could accompany the writing. Also, because my mom is a writer, I would probably want to stay away from that medium while telling her story. It might feel like I was stepping on her toes too much. That said, I would certainly use a lot of her personal essays while writing, and I would obviously interview her to get all of the necessary information. Actually, that might be the biggest challenge: convincing my mom to divulge her deep, dark secrets from the 1970’s. But those stories would also make for the best graphic narrative. And, ironically, it’s a narrative that she probably wouldn’t write herself.

Maus: My Father and I

I remember, when I was younger--I think that I was in 9th grade--my father was driving me and my sister to a destination that I have forgotten. While he was driving, he explained the importance of a family’s history and began to narrate our family’s past to me and my sister. Being the annoying, stupid rebellious teenager that I was, I was uninterested. Writing this post, I realize how much I regret being so annoying and stupid.

Reading Maus and relating it to my own family’s history, I see how I am similar to pre-MausArt Spiegelman. Although my parents and I aren’t separated by a terrible and horrifying event like the Holocaust, Spiegelman and I are still similar in the way that we are separated from our parents by the past itself. The prompt for this blog post has helped me to realize that I don’t know anything about my father or my mother beyond the bare essentials. There are the very important elements of their past with which I am familiar, but do I actually know them? Yes, they left South Korea to raise me and my sister in America. Yes, my parents used to live in Georgia and then moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Yes, my parents used to own a doughnut shop on Jones Creek Road and closed it when my father earned his degrees. However, I remember being completely caught by surprise when my family visited California while I was in high school. My father had extensive knowledge of San Francisco, and, unable to withhold my curiosity, I wanted to know how he was so familiar with a place that was so complicated and foreign to me. It wasn’t until that visit to California, which was taken when I was--I think--in tenth grade, that I learned that my father used to live in San Francisco! I think of that moment, of that suddenly new dimension to my father, as the perfect example to how I, Raymond Jeong, don’t know shit about Minseon Jeong as Art Spiegelman doesn’t know anything about Vladek Spiegelman.

Reading Maus with my regret in perspective, I was actually angered by Art Spiegelman’s treatment of Vladek. Perhaps, to other readers, Spiegelman is simply displaying his annoyance with his father that was developed during his childhood. However, I was pissed at Art’s constant annoyance with Vladek. Spiegelman didn’t appear to be a person who was truly concerned for his father. He appeared to be someone who was concerned with only recording his father’s story for the sake of his graphic novel. I expected that, as Art’s interaction with Vladek progressed, Art would become much more sympathetic and appreciative of his father. However, in Maus II, where Vladek tries to give food to Art, the following conversation takes place:

Vladek: So, fine. I can pack the fruitcake in with the cereal for you to take home.

Art: Look. We don’t want any, ok? Just forget it!

Vladek: I cannot forget it... Ever since Hitler I don’t like to throw out even a crumb.

Art: Then just save the damn Special K, in case Hitler ever comes back!

Does the previous conversation actually reflect a son who is truly concerned for his father? I understood that the graphic novel itself is Art’s tribute to his father, but, seeing how Art interacted with his father, I was very tempted to scream at him, saying, “Just take the damn Special K! Don’t you understand what he’s been through?” If I were Art, I would appreciate every moment with Vladek as I am deepened in his narrative. If I were Art, I wouldn’t let my past attitude with Vladek affect how I treat him during his telling of the past. I wish that I knew more about my father, and, although my father and I have a relationship that is very different from Art and Vladek's, I am sure that learning my father’s past would dramatically change my attitude toward him.

Or... would it?

Writing this post, I am reminded of a conversation that I had with a fellow Donner-mate during this past summer in our apartment at Mirrielees. For some reason, he and I began to discuss our families. At the end of telling my parents’ stories to him, I admitted that I barely know my parents’ past and assumed that I know little about my parents. His response to my claims surprised me. He said that knowing little about my parents’ past doesn’t mean that I don’t know them. In fact, knowing who my parents were in the past is almost irrelevant to how I currently interact with them. Although I felt angry at Art, that conversation has helped me to change the conclusion that I wanted to reach in this post because I realize that Art doesn’t have to act differently toward his father. How he interacts with Vladek in the present (or, rather, the present in Maus) doesn’t have to be influenced by Vladek’s experience in the Holocaust. Art can never truly relate to his father with that experience. Art can use only his own life to relate to his father. He cannot change his attitude toward Vladek just by learning his past. Art knows his father only during the time after the Holocaust, and it is only during that time in Vladek’s life can Art improve his relationship with his father.

Maus has helped me to realize that I know little about my father's past. Relating it to my own family's past, I felt angry at Art for how he treated his father as the story of his experience during the Holocaust unfolded. However, understanding that acquiring knowledge of Vladek's past shouldn't affect how Art interacts with his father, I know that asking my father about his past will help me to become closer to him, without necessarily changing my attitude toward him. It is my duty to depend not only on the past but also on the present if I want to improve my relationship with my father.

Family History

I am well aware

that by no means

equal repute

attends the narrator

and the doer of deeds.

—Sallust

Reading Maus seems to have awakened in me thoughts about how one preserves the past, about historicity, truth, honesty, and memory. Why do people attempt to record versions of events that happened to them, their family members, complete strangers, fictional characters? The cautious optimist in me would like to believe that people do these things for unselfish reasons—that the whole game of creating literature about the past is more than simply meticulous narcissism. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in his book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (which is in many ways a critical work about the historicity of such events as the Holocaust) writes: "Human beings participate in history both as actors and as narrators. The inherent ambivalence of the word 'history' in many modern languages, including English, suggests this dual participation. In vernacular use, history means both the facts of the matter and a narrative of those facts, both 'what happened' and 'that which is said to have happened.' The first meaning places the emphasis on the sociohistorical process, the second on our knowledge of that process or on a story about that process." So if he’s right, then where does this leave the backward gazing among us? How aware are we supposed to be of the process of creating historical forms when we create those forms? What is the distinction between the two? What is lost in translation? Did something happen if it was never recorded? Where does non-fiction fall into the category of history? What means does graphic non-fiction have to convey is historical content? In Maus, the world we’re given by Spiegelman is highly fictive, if not entirely fictional. The characters are “real people,” one could suppose, but they’re conveyed as animals, which inflects the whole project with an air of fictionalism. Why did Spiegelman do this? Where does he see himself in Trouillot’s mode: how wide a stance does it take to straddle the line between historical subject and narrator?

When I was reading the first volume, I actually stopped and thought about whether I should attempt something similar to this project. Should I ask to record the life stories of older members of my family? Would it seem like I’m not-so-subtly suggesting death is on the way? I know that, if I did lose a loved one, and if I let the opportunity to talk to them about the things they lived through pass, I would regret it. I was pleasantly surprised to be tasked with this post, since the question of my own family’s history had been on my mind. I know that if I did choose to make a serious project of it, I would have to resort to prose. I completely lack the ability to draw. What would I discover? What would I discover about myself? These are my questions, my fears, my hesitations.

How I'd tell my family story

Maus is such powerful and striking family story, obviously reviewed and heralded by critics as such. Thinking about telling the story of my own family seems almost silly by comparison. Maus is so powerful because it seamlessly navigates through a complicated parent-child relationship and the story of Holocaust victims, but one seems almost as important as the other through the book. Obviously the Holocaust was a human tragedy of no comparison, and yet Spiegelman also conveys the importance of the relationship with his father, which is so important because it is the reality of the present time. Spiegelman does not allow the reader to stay in the past and learn purely of his father’s Holocaust story. Sometimes, it seemed to me, the narrative of the present time (when Spiegelman is gathering the story from his father) is just in the way of me hearing more of the Holocaust story. In those times I just wanted to know what was happening to Artie’s father in the past, instead of listening to him bicker with his son in the present. The story of the present, though, is so important because it is the result of Vladek’s Holocaust experience. The story of the present hinges on whether the Vladek of the past is able to survive. By understanding the horrors of Vladek’s past, his present grouchiness seems more justified and his complicated relationship with Artie is more understandable. Thus the family narrative serves the purpose of mapping the past and connecting it with the reality of the present. I thought this was truly amazing.

I would not be able to expertly weave in my own relationship to my close relatives as I narrated a much grander human story. I certainly wouldn’t be able to communicate my story by drawing. But then, I’ve always had the impulse to tell the story of my family, because I know it is at once incredibly unique and incredibly relative to the lives of others. I often write down the stories of my family, either daily interactions that I find funny, or interesting family stories from grandparents, hoping that someday I’ll have the wisdom to know what to do with them. Sometimes I think everyone does this and that the impulse for narrative is just innately strong across the human race- that we all want to write down stories and share them in hopes that we can either find someone who relates to us, or let others know they’re not alone, or even to put the story down in a some form so it is not trapped inside the mind. I think a lot of stories exist as movies or books or paintings because people can’t bear to be the only ones who know or see the world from their own perspective. So besides all of this, I have the impulse to tell the story of my family, too. My motivation is no clearer than others; I suppose I’d be hoping to reach out to a large audience, but mostly to document my family’s story for future generations of my family. I would have them know that nothing has ever been simple or easy as family tree lines seem to indicate, and that things have never been as difficult or complicated as breaks in the family tree might indicate.

Once again, after a narrative like Maus, it’s daunting to consider creating my own. I still think it’s so important, though, for the purpose of connecting past and present. For the story of my own family, I would choose the medium of the novel. Besides the fact that I have very little drawing ability, I like the novel because the reader has to create their own images as they read, and many readers will use the images from their own lives simply because it’s what they know best. Thus the novel may be more powerful as a tool for connecting to the lives of others, simply causing them to place some of their own life into the story through what they imagine as they read. I’d like to write mostly about the daily events of my family life, and how these events connect to the live of past generations. I would use humor to tell most of the stories, because most of the events are funny, but also because it would be more enjoyable to write. Humorous family narratives have always entertained me, and I’d hope to provide the same entertainment for others and make connections to some parts of their life. It’s a work in progress…

My Family & Maus: War, Tragedy, Love

My own family’s story is also one of war, tragedy, and love. Because I was so immersed in Art Spiegelman’s account of his father’s struggles during the Holocaust, I didn’t realize that I could relate to Spiegelman. The realization dawned on me in Maus II, when he described the his father’s experiences in the camps. The treatment, the hard labor, the desire for survival in a place known only for death and suffering, and especially the image of burning mice on page 39, made me think of my own father’s experiences in the concentration camps during the Vietnam War.

The first time I asked my dad about his journey from the depths of the Vietnam War to America was in seventh grade, when we were asked to map out family immigration paths. He told me he and a few friends tried to leave Vietnam by boat. After Saigon fell, everyone rushed to escape, jumping on boats leaving the docks, packing themselves like sardines just to get away. Not everyone made it out. My dad and his friends were led by someone claiming that a boat leaving the dock offered to take natives with them. Instead, my dad and many others entered concentration camps. After this, my dad couldn’t go on, only saying that there was much brainwashing, hard labor cultivating the rice fields, and few survivors of the harshness of the camps. As a thirteen-year-old, I couldn’t fathom the pain in my father’s eyes as he silently relived the horrors of that period, being too shocked to see the tears welling in his eyes. And in many ways, I still can’t imagine what life was like in those camps, because as Maus illustrates so profoundly, it is different for every individual. You can get same broad themes, but you can never really get the same story twice.

And like Vladek Spiegelman – but in a much lesser degree – I noticed signs of how the War and the camps affected my dad. Whenever we stayed overnight at my grandparent’s house and there weren’t enough beds, my dad would sleep on the floor in the room, sometimes without a pillow or a blanket, instead of on the couch in the living room, offhandedly saying that this was nothing compared to what he had to go through. It was things like that, that made me extremely curious, but I stopped pushing the subject, scared of provoking unwanted memories and emotions.

So for that seventh-grade project, I instead mapped out my mom’s story (in contrast to Art), and it is through this story that provoked my overflowing respect for my parents for the strength they exhibited despite all that they have been through, and gratitude for them in their efforts to ensure that I won’t have to experience the hardships they did. My mom, being the oldest, began working to support her family when she was thirteen. This was 1975. She stayed for several years to care for her family before escaping with her brother to Malaysia. They survived fifteen days at sea without food or water before reaching land. My mom and uncle then stayed for several months in the Philippines before being sponsored to Santa Barbara, CA. I only found out later that my grandfather actually worked for the U.S. government at that time, and was offered the chance to relocate his family to America way before 1975. But, wanting to relocate his entire extended family, my grandfather was forced to wait for sufficient accommodations until… it became too late. I learned from my mom later that by the time my grandparents arrived in America in 1991, my grandfather’s health was already failing, due to the extreme guilt he felt for wanting so much that he ended up having nothing at all. He passed away when I was eight. Looking back, after taking this class and reading Maus, I think one of the hardest things for me to accept is that I was too young, too naïve, and in some ways too scared (my grandfather was very intimidating) to ask the questions I wanted to ask about his past. I only hope one day I can make up for it by learning my dad’s story. About a year ago, my dad told me that someday he too hopes he can tell me what happened in the nine years he was in the camps.

But interwoven into this tragic was story is also the story of how my parents got together. They had met briefly in Vietnam before going their separate ways and only met again after my mom came to San Jose and couldn’t contact any of her friends. My aunt told me that if my dad hadn’t forgotten something on the way to work and had to come back for it, he would have missed my mom’s phone call that morning. The rest is history.

After thinking over my parent’s history and looking at how Spiegelman told his, I think I would probably tell their story in textual form, accompanied by the pictures that my parents still have. It is the most comfortable medium for me, and I believe I can do a better job in conveying their stories this way. At most, I would consider a scrapbook-style storytelling. However, with my parents’ particular stories, I think it would be best told in their own words and I would prefer transcribing their words onto paper because I believe the way they tell their story would better capture the feelings of their experiences better than I ever can in my own words.

Homework for Monday, October 17th

Once again, I have finished Maus, and once again, I have tears in my eyes.

For Monday,
a) finish Maus
b) use Maus as a springboard into some aspect of your own family history
c) be prepared to open an investigation into an element of Maus' visual storytelling:
-Lee & Kyle: "Prisoner on the Hell Planet"
-Annie & Leslie: Transitions between past and present levels of action
-David, Raymond & Lisa: The handdrawn qualities of the lettering, image and page layout

See you on monday!
adam

I Laika Lot

Sorry for ripping off your wordplay there Lee, but I must say, there is something about this book that really excites me. I don’t know what it is exactly but I feel like I could talk about it for days; fortunately we got some time in class for me to spill some of the thoughts that were literally begging to be spoken. I still feel like I have a ton to say however, so I’ll try to use this forum to get some more of it out.

First of all, there are a few more minor things I wanted to mention about color that I didn’t get to say in class. Specifically, I wanted to talk some more about color’s usefulness in displaying emotion and some more ways that that was depicted. Lisa and I talked a lot about Abadzis’ use of primary colors to display emotion: the contrast of red and blue, black and white, yellow. But we didn’t really touch on some of the secondary colors used in the book. Perhaps that was a good thing because I think we both felt like our grasp on his intentions when using those colors was pretty loose.

The first color I wanted to address was green. I wasn’t really sure what it meant, but Lisa and I both noticed that many times it made an appearance during times of calm, escape, or almost safety (however fleeting the moment may be). This can be seen on pages 69-75, where Kudryavka is first introduced to Yelena, in some of the (possibly romantic?) exchanges between Yelena and Oleg Georgivitch, on pages 141-142, where Dr. Yazdovsky offers to take Kudryavka home to meet his kids, and also in the moments where Yelena is in the park with her friends. Green is also seen in the sweater worn by Tatiana.

Another complex color used in this book is purple. This color shows up pretty much randomly throughout most of the novel until it makes a major appearance on pages 158-163. In this section, Yelena is preparing Laika for her upcoming space travel and seems to have adopted an attitude of resignation and cynicism. She is deeply sad, but does not hesitate to snap back at her superiors with snarky remarks. This mixed bag of emotions, I feel, can be connected to purple in that purple can be thought of as a mix of red and blue. What she is feeling is a combination of intense sadness (characterized in this book by the color blue) and a fiery anger (characterized by the color red). The result is a complex jumble of feelings and a purple hue. Again I could be way off here but I just wanted to put my best guess out there.

I also wanted to mention a bit about panel count in this book. Reading McCloud, I feel like I am more equipped to notice the subtleties of panels, spying out how they flow through the book and what they can do and signify. With that said, what stood out most for me was Abadzis’ positioning of panels to moderate the pace of the story. According to McCloud, moment-to-moment transitions can often slow down the tempo of a comic, giving off an almost slow-motion quality. Abadzis counteracts that effect (most notably on pages 41-42) by overlapping the panels and even having them gradually slope upward or downward as the reader progresses. By using this technique, I felt he was able to keep pages with many panels (of which there are many) from feeling long and drawn out. Also by doing this consistently throughout the novel, he creates moments of pause and contemplation whenever he broke away from the norm with simplicity and minimalism (130-132, 185-186, 198-199)

Returning to color, as I conclude, I wanted to quickly address an area of confusion for Lisa and me when we were studying the book for its use of color. Try as we might, we could not settle on a good explanation for the flurry of colors in the background of the panels on page 138. Gray, green, blue, purple, red, yellow, white, and black all make appearances here, and we were stumped as to why. Any ideas, anyone?

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud discusses different combinations of words and pictures. To me, Laika appears to be very dialogue-based. In fact, rarely there are pages without a character verbally communicating with another to help the reader to understand what occurs in a panel. Because Laika depends on dialogue to a great extent, it heavily employs what Scott McCloud calls Word Specific Panels, where “pictures illustrate, but don’t significantly add to largely complete text” (153) and Duo-Specific Panels, “in which both words and pictures send essentially the same message” (153). (Actually, I have trouble with distinguishing a few of Scott McCloud’s categories. To determine the prominent category that is used in Laika, I tried to imagine most of the panels without their images. Because I can still understand the occurrence that is conveyed by most panels by just using the text, I believe that my choices for Laika’s more prominent panels are close.) There are times when Nick Abadzis uses Picture Specific Panels, especially when Laika does not interact with the human characters. However, Abadzis even has to write text for Laika for moments when Yelena imagines Laika speaking to her. Without Laika’s words that are imagined by Yelena, she would have looked more insane than empathetic. She would have resembled Jon Arbuckle in Garfield Minus Garfield, in which Garfield is removed from each Garfield comic strip to show Jon suffering from loneliness and insanity because he would be talking to himself.

A beautiful choice in using Interdependent Panels comes on pages 129-132. Many things are clarified about Chief Designer Korolev. The reader is hit with surprise when Korolev reveals that he did not follow the moon to his “destiny” (which is what I assumed from the very first scene of the graphic novel). Although I was very against Korolev, when I read through those pages, I felt for him. Using Interdependent Panels, Abadzis is able to show Korolev’s very human side, the side that is very dedicated to the common belief in destiny and fate. He introduces the reader into Korolev’s shoes, showing Korolev’s rendition of his tale and its accompanying images, most of which nobody could understand unless both text and image were available. He helps the reader to understand from where Korolev comes with choosing Laika. In my case, while I protested Korolev’s choosing Laika, I understood that Korolev had to do what he had to do when he heard Laika’s barking, which is revealed to be a momentous coincidence. I understood that Korolev was literally forced to follow his instinct when he heard Laika’s barking, and I would have done the same. Therefore, I could hardly blame him for it.

Nick Abadzis uses various panel transitions to influence the reader’s experience. On pages 176-187, the panel transition Subject-to-Subject shows various people’s reactions to Sputnik II’s launch, especially Yelena’s and Laika’s. Switching from the control center to Laika and vice-versa, the reader is allowed to coincide the dialogue of those in the control center to what happens to Laika. More importantly, the reader becomes much more affected by the dialogue when he is exposed to images of Laika. As a result, the reader becomes a part of the crowd inside the control center, witnessing Laika’s fate in real-time, just as those in the control center would have. However, the reader also witnesses Laika’s fate through Abadzis’ visual interpretation of what happened to Laika while she was in space.

Because Laika is very dialogue-based, the most prominent panel transition is Subject-to-Subject. However, the next prominent--and actually more powerful--panel transition is Moment-to-Moment or Panel-to-Panel. There are various instances when the reader needs little closure to determine what occurs between the panels. For example, on pages 24 and 120, the reader sees Korolev walking toward a door, opening it, and closing it. Such a Moment-to-Moment transition effectively portrays that Korolev’s decision and goal is final and that he cannot be deterred from it. It also presents an ominous feel, of which I know the cause because I began this book with prior knowledge the Laika’s fate. My favorite Moment-to-Moment (or Panel-to-Panel?) transition occurs on page 169, favorite for it is very effective for my emotional experience as the reader. At the bottom of page 169, the reader sees Yelena saying farewell to Laika. However, just before she closes the hatch, Yelena’s hand appears on the door and the reader is afforded a very brief moment to see Laika’s face, on which is a look of surprise and sad disappointment. An effective use of Panel-to-Panel occurs on the very last two pages, where the reader sees Laika’s rocket burning in Earth’s atmosphere. There is no need for Moment-to-Moment in those panels. The reader, having learned Laika’s terrible fate and inability to return to Earth intact, needs little closure in reading those panels.

Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics has significantly helped me to understand how graphic novels work. The theory that it presents boosted my appreciation for Laika and will do the same for future works.

Laika: Breaking the 2-D Plane

Laika was an illuminating read in terms of storytelling because Abadzis really went all out with his arrangement of the panel on the page and the elasticity he gave to panel borders in size, shape and line. This almost expressionistic treatment of the iconic components of the comic’s form, the panel and word balloons, broke the 2-D plane of the paper as well as the image and created for the viewer a strong sense of time, space, movement, and sound within the space that was manipulated in a way that is not elicited through static panels.

One way that Abadzis broke the 2-D plane of the paper was through the use of overlapping panels. Using cinematic language, one could argue that this overlapping of frames creates a sense of continuity in time between panels. Where the gutter would typically create a sense of discretion between panels, overlapping them has the effect of emphasizing that the frames occurred simultaneously. For example, on page 100 when the entire kennel of dogs is beseeching Yelena to take them home with her—there is an overlapping panel of Yelena’s reaction over Krudyavka’s reaction.

The technique of overlapping panels is also used in conjunction with the inset panel, which is a panel smaller in size than the others and placed on top of two adjacent panels thereby connecting them. These inset panels and generally, the smaller size panels, function as close-ups, but in certain places where it follows this formula of connecting two discreet panels, it shows the P.O.V. of one the characters involved at a critical moment in which the P.O.V. also exposes the character’s motivation. For example, on page 87, Yelena is convincing herself to act against her empathetic instincts while looking at Albina through her cage. Two regular-size panels in the middle tier show her talking to Albina, but linking them is a P.O.V. frame of the way Yelena sees Albina. In this connecting inset panel, Albina is not confined the bars of her cage which would indicate how Yelena sees Albina. To this end, the predetermined form of the panel helps the story with characterization through P.O.V.

There are also some more obvious ways of eliciting the sense of time through panel size and shape. A perfect example of the “filmstrip panel,” which is coincidentally the size and shape of a film strip, is on page 61. Here Abadzis takes one instant in time and breaks it down into frames which isolate the actions and reactions of the market lady enticing the two strays with a piece of meat. By putting multiple perspectives of one instant on a time continuum, it has the effect of slowing time down, or in other words, creating suspense.

A clever use of panels to produce the effect of sound was in the frames that showed an extended period of silence between characters after a verbal exchange. This happens time and again throughout the novel, for example, when Sergei first announces the approval of the satellite program and walks onto the balcony. After the two men’s exchange, their figures remain in a composition that not only creates space for the heaviness of the character’s internal perception of events, but the silence, which is also a sound, asks the reader to linger longer on that wordless panel, to give pause.

Another fascinating play on the iconic characters of panel and word balloon is how Abadzis uses the word balloon as a separate entity from the panel. Word balloons that behave like panels do, and are free to speak from multiple panels. When they do this, they are joining together the time and place of multiple panels, giving the same impression of time continuity with Abadzis’s similar use of overlapping panels. One unique instant is on page 160, when all the various scientists are doing checks before sealing the compartment. Abadzis gives his word balloons perspective in space—there are word balloons we cannot read, or effectively, cannot hear, because they retreat into three-dimensional space above their speaker.

Abadzis also manages to make the page a representation of the physical space in the story, a bit like McCloud sits on, holds up, and interacts with his panel frames and word balloons. There is a kind of reflexivity going on formally here. One of my favorite uses of this spatial inference to physical reality is after Krudyavka has been placed in his dog cabin. Starting on page 173 and through 179, Krudyavka occupies the physical compartment at the bottom corner of the page. There are two instances where characters are traveling in an elevator. Instead of showing us the interior, Abadzis uses x-ray vision to show us the elevator shaft. This also turns the other panels of the page into representations of a sideways blue print of the building they are traveling in.

Finally, I want to make mention of how the design of panels in the page space also create a sense of movement. On p. 82-83 when Krudyavka is sent into the centrifuge contraption for the first time, the panels are horizontally flat to allow for a visual sense of this horizontal movement. The thin, horizontal boxes stacked on top of each other create a sense of speed. In a prime example of panel organization leading to sense of movement, on page 40-41, Krudyavka travels through the air over a the side of a bridge, when he’s disposed of by his reckless owner. Here it was interesting that the step-like location of each progressive panel is almost directly related to the direction of movement taking place on screen. This work is very special in the way in which it not only shows us movement and directionality through the use of motion lines within a frame, but using the placement of the frame itself.