Maus I & II

  


      At first I didn't really like this comic, the artists handwriting sometimes was hard to read and the drawing style wasn't what one would expect from a comic. As I read more of it I started to like it, though I'm not really a fan of darker stories.

    Once I realized that it was not only based upon the artist's family's life during the Holocaust but word for word what his father and others there dictated to him it's story gained a lot more weight for me. Even more so as the artists included bits of conversation between him and others as he was compiling data for this huge project. I really enjoyed reading his fathers story and how Spiegelman did the set up for all of this information to be told. He could have just drawn his fathers story happening in real time for the readers, but instead he chose to tell the story of his father telling him the story and I find that to be a  really unique perspective to get to see. The story's not only about what happened to his father and his family but it's also about their current life and interactions.  I especially enjoyed parts where he is shown working on the comic within the comic, it makes it feel much more real and I like that.

     Something I didn't expect from this book was for the animals that represented different nationalities or groups of people to be a representation of them that only we the readers were aware of. Like when the mice put on pig masks and passed as polish, the masks even emoted like real faces, because in all actuality they were just dressing themselves as the polish would dress and acting as the polish acted. It felt weird to have their animal-ness be something that wasn't really existing. Even more so when the artists chose to remind the reader of this by sometimes drawing himself and others physically and noticeably as people wearing animal masks. Although it is again, a really unique concept that I've never seen presented in comics or media before.

   Although I've knows about the Maus comics since around middle school I'd never actually sat down and read them before, there were a lot of things I didn't expect in the general story and events that the book depicts, but I am even more surprised with how impressively Spiegelman delivers this information and has formatted this comic, it's something different and I can really appreciate that.

This is MY city

I looked at Will Eisner's comic The Spirit and tried to mimic the page format along with the shading style on top of my own style.

Tin Tin

I chose to try and imitate elements of Herge's Tin Tin comics. I attempted to mimic the format and panel compositions/layouts of these comic pages.

Hark! A Comic!

I chose to try to imitate Kate Beaton's style of comics after reading 'Hark! A Vagrant!' her style was a lot harder to pin down that I thought it would be, she keeps consistent in inconsistently drawing her characters; something I didn't even notice until trying to analyze her style. I like how she makes comic drawing look effortless, she warps characters so constantly that it looks normal and fluid. Something that is not very easy for me to do myself.

The Wordless Comic

Making wordless comics is challenging in many ways. Although since it's almost entirely based on reading gestures sometimes facial features aren't even needed! Though they do help tell a lot about what a person is feeling, so does body language.

Shaun Tan's 'The Arrival'

      The first few pages of The Arrival were a little tough for me to follow. Without any previous knowledge about this very different world and it's characters the intro was a little tough to understand but as the story went on it became easier to read and understand what was happening in the story and what the characters were going through. It gets to the point where Shaun Tan is working with so many panels and in such a sequential way that it almost becomes like watching a muted movie; there are words being said from person to person but we as the reader can't hear them. It is through characters actions and interactions we can still understand and follow what is happening very clearly.

      It's much easier to understand this kind of story telling after you're already immersed in it. After you get invested in the characters and their lives you stop noticing the lack of a physical narration and just start understanding peoples interactions and reactions to things, it's a very intimate way of storytelling. As the reader the lack of words makes you depend upon the illustrations for information about the story and with this kind of extra attention having to be placed upon characters, I believe it makes the reader become more invested in the story than a book with words does. When you read words you're forced to actually look at the words and sometimes this can make people pay more attention to the writing in a book than the illustrations that are actually meant to tell the story.