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.