Hello again ASTU!

I hope everyone had a good and productive reading break!

As a class, we dedicated a lot of time on the concept of comic books as a platform for increasingly more serious and somber themes and stories. In a previous blog post I wrote in the first term, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi was a graphic novel that centered around contemporary social issues, most significantly about the Iranian Revolution. This story featured a unique perspective of a young girl and it utilized symbols to represent larger themes such as religion and childlike innocence in a time of violence. In the second semester, we explored another graphic novel Maus authored by Art Spiegelman. The storyline focused in on the author himself interviewing his father to understand and surface his memories of WWII and the Holocaust. Graphic novels and comics have not always been a mainstream way of recording and telling of somber events, but it has made its way in doing so by unique artistic styles and even as a way to present a personal story.

From my own experience with reading comics when I was in high school, they were mostly for light reading and to enjoy an adventurous story. A particular series that I fondly remember was called Amulet, a story with magic and fantasy action, pictures fully coloured in and a straightforward plotline. Traditionally, comic books are thought to be meant for fun stories and for a young audience. Maus was notably one of the first works that changed the notions of graphic novels and comics as a form of media.

There are many dramatic contrasts in the art style that Spiegelman depicts and the style that Satrapi uses in her own story. In Persepolis, the storyline correlates almost directly to the cartoon-like style, as a childlike perspective may relate to more cartoon and simple drawings. On the other hand, Spiegelman illustrates detailed drawings but also uses a minimalist, iconic style like simple beads for eyes and nose. There is also a high contrast between the black and white, with shading that adds the detailed depth to the panels, almost a lifelike appearance compared to a 2-D image.

However, in their similarities, both authors depict themselves in their graphic novels with their own story and personal experiences. Satrapi projects herself into a child version of herself experiencing the Iranian revolution, while Spiegelman also puts himself in the story, although he is not the center of the main plotline. The comic platform allows for the use of images to show expressions of the characters, it often allows the audience to feel more intimate with the story. The freedom to create images is also a platform for symbols. This is most obvious with Spiegelman’s depiction of the Germans as cats, and the Jewish characters as mice in the story, playing on the cat and mice animal relationship of predator and prey.

Both Spiegelman and Satrapi authored graphic novels that present dramatically different stories of traumas caused by historic social issues. With the usage of images in a graphic novel style, it requires deeper analysis of icons and symbols are drawn that represent a deeper layer of understanding. Personally, I enjoyed learning the historical context in the story, but the direction that Spiegelman took to presenting it made me as a reader think about why the Jewish were drawn as mice, and the Polish as pigs, and this was only possible through the use of the graphic novel as the platform of choice.

Thank you for reading!