FACS1900B

High/Low Image/text theory/fiction: Graphic novels
Understanding Maus/Understanding Comics

understanding maus/comics

I

"no art after auschwitz"?
"reality too complex for comics"
what is at stake for Spigelman?

II

How Maus is constructed
animal metaphor
black and white
the 'universal' icon
early sketches for MAUS

III

how comics 'work'
- panels
- juxtaposition - time is space
- closure
- the gutter

IV

- issues of truth and accuracy
- comics as 'art'? - rel. to postmodernism
- art after auschwitz

Art After Auschwitz

PRISONER ON THE HELL PLANET

three different versions of the story...

denaturalizing the animal metaphor

REALISTIC/ICONOGRAPHIC Image: rejected woodcut I Taking a look at Spiegelman's early attempts to render characters makes this notion more or less transparent. (Maus is on the left)

but beware:

this is not art spiegelman

this is not his father

this is not a mouse

this is not a holocaust survivor

this is not what happened

these are representations

-- comics combine stenghts from other media

TIME AND SPACE

image reveals the spatial boundaries between the public square and the'private' space at home to be porous, penetrable.

CLOSURE: WHAT HAPPENS

TRUTH?ACCURACY