Revised Maus Piece

I’m not gonna lie, when I think of comics the first thing that comes to mind is grown men fighting criminals in tights and outlandish garbs. Maybe I would then think to cats that love lasagna, or boys that wiff footballs, or those really political comics I never understand. But it certainly never jumps to a story about a writer interviewing his father on his time in the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust. Maybe it’s because of the first examples above, but I don’t think people grasped the idea that a comic could cover mature themes till Maus (and while mature comics had existed before Maus, Maus’s popularity brought the idea of mature comics to mainstream audiences).

It’s easy to see why a story like Maus became as influential as it was. Despite depicting a very adult and mature subject matter it’s something even children could follow. I remember friends of mine reading Maus back in the sixth grade. While it constantly depicts horrific imagery, nothing gory is ever shown. Characters swear, but it’s never anything major. And I think what adds to its appeal is the story’s subject matter. There is something so appealing about the holocaust, the fact that humanity could allow such heinous treatment of other human beings to happen and then let that go on for years. It’s hard to believe it even really happened, but it did. Like a terrible scene you want to look away from but can’t peel your eyes off of. Any retelling of a survivors experience in the holocaust is gonna be fascinating, because they all went through so much just to be able to tell their stories.

Art Spiegelman also doesn’t slack on the artwork when telling his story either, taking full advantage of the medium to add layers and depth to the story being presented. There’s an entire metaphor going on throughout the books where the holocaust victims are depicted as mice, while the Nazis are depicted as cats, showing the dominating presence the Nazi party had in that time in a way that could never be translated into a written format. It holds the narrative weight of a novel but also uses images to help deepen the impact of the story. When the audience sees an illustration of mice screaming in agony as they’re burned alive, it carries a weight with it that words could never hold a candle to. It’s for that, Maus was able to open people’s eyes to the potential of the medium. They could tell more mature stories on the level of  books or movies, and through using the strengths of the medium conveys a story only comics could tell.

From Super Man to Regular Man

I’ve noticed a shift in the styles of stories in comics as new variations on the style are created. Comic books are usually shown depicting super heroes, beings with superhuman qualities far away from the reality of daily life as a means of escapism for the average man. Even in comic books like Watchmen and The Killing Joke, which goes as far as possible to humanize its superheroes and villains, the viewer is still shown a grown man dressed up as a bat beating up a clown and a man with blue skin teleporting to Mars for some alone time. Still pretty far away from what you'd see driving to work. Comic books as we know it is inseparable from people’s perceptions of it as superhero stories. Obviously not all comics have to be about superheroes, bright spandex, and justice. The last thing I’d expect in an issue of The Peanuts is for Batman to show up and start beating up stores at the mall for celebrating Christmas too early. But the point stands that there is a clear divide between the Earth of comics and the Earth of our reality.

Graphic novels seemingly shifted focus of its contents from fiction to nonfiction though, with the originator of the graphic novel, A Contract With God, being based off of things Eisner heard going on in the city he grew up in. Maus and Blankets also focus on the histories and stories of real people, going through Art Spiegelman's dad’s experiences in the Holocaust and Craig Thompson’s time growing up. Even in fictional stories like Asterios Polyp, the down to earth nature of the book’s storytelling makes it feel as if the story could’ve been based on a real person’s life. With the creation of the graphic novel came stories that were more tied to unique perspectives of its authors and ultimately became more personal. Comics tell stories about super people, graphic novels tell stories about normal people.
That leads us to today and webcomics. The biggest distinction between a webcomic like “Ducks” and the graphic novel is the lack of a clear narrative with webcomics. Graphic novels are still in some ways stories. Maus is about showing Spiegelman's dad’s experiences in the Holocaust, Blankets has Craig develop and mature as he grows from a child to an adult, A Contract With God shows us different people’s time living in the city. This is not the case with "Ducks". "Ducks" doesn’t feel like a story, so much as a picture journal of the authors time at her old job, showing life at its realist. "Ducks" is a series of loosely tied together events that don't conclude in anything major, there are no arcs, climaxes, acts, just people. Real people. Showing the journey of the medium as we see the shift in comics to graphic novels from fiction to nonfiction, and the shift in graphic novels to webcomics from stories to reality. This is even shown in the artwork, which is much more crude than what one would expect from comics, but this also adds to the way reality is far less appealing than fiction, which only presents the most interesting parts of life and leaves everything else only to the imagination.

Killing The Preconceptions of The Superhero

What does it truly mean to be a superhero? If a comic book were to have sentience and if said comic book’s name was Batman: The Killing Joke, it would argue that a superhero is more than just a costume, more than the person inside it. It’s a will, a will to carry a burden heavier than any other. A will to go through the worst experiences and still come out able to maintain justice. Superheroes were originally constructed as powers with people, not people with powers. Clark Kent wasn’t a person, he was a vehicle to display cool superpowers, with little in the way of any actual character besides his desire to do the right thing. I couldn’t tell you a single character trait of The Flash, but I know he runs quick, in fact that’s about all I know about him. Because that’s all I was meant to know about him. Superheroes were nothing more than representations of cool abilities with bland characters for people to project themselves onto.
 This is the major change comics of the 80’s and 90’s brought to the medium, switching the focus from the powers to the people behind the suits. Comics in this era were about Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Barry Gordon, not about batsuit, flying speed laser beam, and superspeed.
This brings us to the Killing Joke, a story squarely dedicated to showing that even when pushed as far as he possibly can, Bruce Wayne will still do the right thing no matter how hard of a decision it is. Batman isn’t a superhero because he wears a giant batsuit while stopping minor crimes. Batman is a superhero because he makes the hardest decisions a person could make - keeping alive the man responsible for disabling his friend, stripping her and taking pictures of her injured body, and torturing the chief of the police department - all for the sake of preserving and maintaining justice. Bruce Wayne’s code to never kill has always been a part of who Bruce Wayne is, however The Killing Joke puts Bruce Wayne's morals to the test. Bruce Wayne’s never been forced to confront the ramifications of who he’s kept alive in a major way. The reason The Joker is such is a great foil to Batman in The Killing Joke is because he’s fighting Bruce Wayne ideologically, pushing his morals to their limit and forcing him to do what is right even if it means the keeping the Joker alive. It’s a major part of who Bruce Wayne is, and it’s development as a result of him losing his parents as a child makes it a believable part of who he is. He fights crime because he doesn’t want anyone else to suffer like he has. If he kills, he’s no better than the man who murdered his parents, thus he locks away the criminals he fights. It’s these two aspects of Bruce in conjunction with The Killing Joke’s plot, gives the reader a character who lost everything while he was still a child, and shows their true resolve in maintaining their ideals even in the worst of scenarios.

The Actual Family Vacation

The family vacation trope is one as old as time. More commonly seen is films with the likes of the classic National Lampoon films to more recent films like, Vacation and uh … Diary of A Wimpy: Dog Days (a true modern masterpiece). The family vacation trope is a staple of American media. But as times have changed I’ve noticed a shift in the approach of making the family vacation story into the “The Actual Family Vacation” story. The term referring to a vacation film which goes away from the unrealistic narrative conventions of most family vacation films in order to tell a story that feels more like what an actual family vacation experience would be like, often involving things like more mature subject matters, lack of narrative structure, and seemingly have a preference to abruptly end without any major climaxes. Stories like the movie, The Way, Way Back and the book we’ll be focusing on, This One Summer, are what I categorize as “The Actual Family Vacation” stories, as both feature the traits listed prior.
 What makes This One Summer so interesting is its lack of any forced elements in its plot. There are never any moments in this book that couldn't believably happen in reality.The plot with the pregnant girl is kept very down to earth, and while it is brought up often, the conflict is never ever resolved. Which makes sense, seeing as it was just an event that passes by Rose. Nothing of particular importance happens to Rose either. Like a real beach vacation Rose spends most of the book watching movies with her friend or coasting off the waves of the beach. The drama between her parents is something many people have dealt with themselves in some form or fashion. All of it feels like it could've been based off of a real vacation the authors had, nothing dramatized for the sake of the reader’s interest. Rose does at one point overhear her mother and aunt discussing some important things, a cliche of many stories of numerous genres. However it's not uncommon for adults to discuss many of the things going on in their lives amongst one another, and given Rose's lack of anything to occupy her time, it makes sense that she could overhear her parent’s speaking.
Many stories like to dramatize events for the sake of maintaining the audience’s interest or for making the story work better under conventional structure and means, however what kept me reading This One Summer was its ability to just show people on vacation. The reason so many stories are based off true events is because life itself contains many intriguing events that are often more entertaining than what the human mind is capable of creating. This One Summer proves this theory to be correct, creating a fictional story that maintains readers attention to its conclusion, not in spite of its choice to follow a more mundane sequence of events, but because it embraces the mundanity of life to show the reader a world very close to our own.

Asterios Polyp: A Contract With God's Spiritual Sequel

It’s been 40 years since the release of A Contract With God by Will Eisner revolutionized the comic book landscape through its creation of the graphic novel. The creation of Maus then pushed forward in the evolution of A Contract With God by popularizing the graphic novel, legitimizing comics as capable of telling more adult oriented stories and, what is most important for the sake of this piece, forever changing the layout of the graphic novel. It could be said that the reason pages in A Contract With God are styled the way they are, with images and text often separate, and the comic book styled panel often going unused and instead replaced with loose outlines, is so that it lessens the limits of what Eisner can put in each illustration, thus allowing for greater details that couldn’t be put in text. But these style of page layout also could have been done as a means of furthering the graphic novel from the comic book, since keeping a similar layout to the comic book often leads to confusion as to whether what is being read is a comic book or graphic novel. Why I bring all this up is because I haven’t seen a graphic novel in the style of A Contract With God since A Contract With God, which I believe may in part be because Maus popularized the idea of the graphic novel less as a different medium from comics and more as a comic book that tells a more adult story, but also could just be that A Contract With God was the first of its kind, thus it was still experimenting with what a graphic novel and couldn’t innovate what a graphic novel could be. Either way after weeks of searching, not searching, I think I found what I’ve been looking for.
Within the first couple pages of Asterios Polyp I was having major flashbacks to my time with A Contract With God, with page 19 being the first page to really this one in for me, this style of page, where the words carry a weight to them that the images only enhance, and not vice versa, is something A Contract With God did that most graphic novels have reversed since. In those couple of seconds I spent on the page I emerged at the conclusion that this was the modern reimagining of that original format of graphic novel Eisner had pioneered. Since Maus back in 1980 had popularized the graphic novel as a more word heavy comic book, many graphic novels had followed in the comic book format, panels, speech bubbles, etc. Asterios immediately stands out because of this, and made me curious with where it was heading. It still carries with it the standard Maus had created, but it seems to switch between the Eisner style of page layout and Spiegelman layout often, and it all culminates in what feels more like a spiritual sequel to what Eisner’s story may have been going for than what I’ve read in most stories since (not to discredit graphic novel that don’t follow the format of A Contract With God).

BlackJack Shot First

I am being very careful in my choice of words in calling BlackJack the predecessor to medical procedural dramas like House M.D. or comedies like Scrubs. BlackJack was not the creator of this style of storytelling, as the format is reminiscent of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the 19th and 20th century. Rather it is a spiritual successor to that style of storytelling - with our main character solving different self contained stories each chapter - created by the father of manga himself, Osamu Tezuka.
BlackJack is a very simple story, with the titular character, BlackJack, going around and solving his patients’ problems every chapter (or rather from the chapters I read) and it is easy to write it off because everything about it seems so basic. As the spiritual sequel to Holmes this can make the stories of Blackjack seem lesser by comparison, as Sherlock Holmes stories had a lot of moving parts, with every page Doyle writes containing as many different as he can cram into each plot, however the important thing to note is both the medium in which BlackJack is told and its impact on popular media in the future.
Going in order of the list above, BlackJack is, in essence, a comic book, and as such has much less time to set up and full develop its plots when compared to shows like House, which have half an hour to an hour to full flesh out its themes and ideas, as opposed to BlackJack’s 20 pages. Unless Tezuka was willing to bloat his stories with pages filled with words, Tezuka instead focuses in on the simplicity and breaks his stories down to their barest parts, saying everything he needs to say while maintaining a style of storytelling that makes every page of BlackJack easy and enjoyable to read.
The other thing to note about BlackJack is its impact of American media. BlackJack is a hugely influential story in Japan, however its impact in American seems nonexistent. It’s the kind of event where its impact goes largely unnoticed, but I believe BlackJack has had some impact on the existence of the medical procedural, since it was one of the earliest pioneers of the genre. Without it there’s no telling if House M.D. or Scrubs would have been made, and that doesn’t sound like much, but leave it to Tezuka to literally create a new genre of story even with one of his (compared to Astro Boy) lesser known series.

American Comics Should RanXerox European Comics

When I first started reading the adventures of Lieutenant Blueberry, I thought I had the story figured out from the first page. Because of my time reading American comics, I expected this to be a light-hearted, child friendly, adventure story about the cool guy, Blueberry, getting kidnapped and finding violently tame ways of escaping the Indians grasp. I know in the grand scheme of things what happens next is still tame, but seeing Blueberry tied down about to be tortured in conjunction with his panicked thought bubble proclaiming “Shit!” as he looks for a way to buy more time surprised me more than any of the adult comics I was reading in weeks prior. It was something so subtle, so small, but seeing this family friendly action hero do anything above a “Damn” made me see though that these comics were not gonna be what I was used to from American comics.
Overall I get the feeling there’s always been a place for more adult stories in European comics, with the problem of censorship not being nearly as much of an issue. Where I see this the most strongly is with Ranxerox, a beautifully, brutally, illustrated work about a robot beating its way through the streets to find its owner (or something along those lines, I was too busy staring at the lusciously detailed artwork to process much beyond it). This was clearly a published work, meaning the graphic content depicted in the story was allowed for distribution publicly in 1978. To put that into perspective, Maus was released two years after Ranxerox, meaning the Europeans were further ahead on what could be shown in a comic book than Americans. If this is what the adult comics, Air Pirate Funnies, Mr. Natural, and Zap! of yesteryear were fighting to produce, then I am beyond appreciative for their contribution to the comic book industry.  Ranxerox is what I look for in an adult story, something with language, sex, and violence, while still showing a world beyond that content. It doesn’t just serve as the punchline of a joke, it’s used to give the viewer a lens into the bizarre, futuristic world Ranxerox takes place in and because we’re informed of the setting, the world of Ranxerox feels like a living, breathing world people inhabit. It’s a work I wish I could have known about sooner since any less time spend with it would be depriving myself of “art”
Stories like the ones above remind me of how much a bubble American society puts itself in. Sure there are occasional foreign properties that make their way to states and get popular (the Pokemon boom of the early 2000’s comes to mind), but a lot of the other products are left completely by the wayside. It’s hard to say for sure without much knowledge of the comic industry, but I get this feeling even the comics of today could learn something from Lieutenant Blueberry, Ranxerox, and the other European stories that didn’t make it stateside popularly speaking. Perhaps it is less a problem with quantity as it is that most of the adult that do come into being just don’t get popular enough to be seen by the majority of audiences. Maybe in Europe these type of stories are just the standard, either way if more stories like that came stateside and got popular, comics could go beyond its current niche of children and middle aged adults.