A father-son relationship in Maus

When I started reading this book, I realized there was a strong theme in which Vladek and Art were immersed, the relationship between both of them. I am sure that Vladek and Art loved each other, but there was a sense of hatred at the same time from son to father, because all the privacy events that Vladek passed through during the Holocaust, and also because Art’s father did not share anything with his son until he asked him this story in order to write this book.

There are two good examples in which I want to focus my attention; the first one is when Art asked his father about his mother’s diaries, he cannot forgive that he burnt them all, consequently Art called his father a murderer, because he thought he killed his mother for a second time, he wanted this diaries while he was depressed because all the pain he suffered from the past, from the holocaust, from his lost.

The other example that I want to highlight is when Vladek wakes his son very early in the morning because he wanted him to help fixing gutter on the roof, but for the reason that of the relationship between them all, he refuses to help his father and wants to feel guilty about it. Time after that, when he grew up, he decided to go to his father’s house in order to remedy the past event, he asked his father for any help, because he felt that the guilty had grown. Till now, Art thinks that he could never forget this sense of pain, despite the fact that his father is dead, he regrets about it.

All things considered, I found blissfully interesting, the fact that Art goes to his father, and asks him about his stories, his experiences in order to create this autobiographical book, Maus. The way Spielgeman adds such a lot of elements, for instance the Holocaust, suicide, anger let me think how great his work is, and in addition to that how he through commix, developed this book, let us know about his father’s experiences being a survivor of the Holocaust, and about his own life.   

What if Vladek had not burnt his wife's diaries? Do you believe that their relationship would have been the same?

Images and the Graphic Novels: Their potential for teaching

 It wasn’t until I started reading Ghost World that I became interested in graphic novels. I even started looking for more exemplars of graphic novels and I realized their potential to be used as a student-friendly material that can eventually increase motivation in students when it comes to reading and, in turn, hopefully enhance reading and writing abilities.

 You may start reading graphic novels as an assignment and end up reading them for pleasure because there is something appealing about its format; the images that can stand on its own and can still mean 1000 word, the mixture of text and images, the black & white or coloured panels  that engages and makes it really easy to read.

However, here I would like to digress a bit from the main point I’m trying to put forward, to assert that images in graphic novels must not be thought as just visual representation to support what is being written, but images also represent concepts that we immediately recognize because we have “unintendedly” conventionally agreed on its meaning as a way to understand reality.

Bringing this point to Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, there is a part in which Enid enters a sex shop and instead of purchasing any object related to sex she just gets a “mask” of Catwoman. This is key to understand the character and in part the plot of this graphic novel; the Catwoman mask is a sex symbol since, culturally, we know that people get this “customs” for sexual purposes; however, Enid wears this mask in everyday life and breaks with the conception of this mask as a sexual icon. This clearly reflects the character’s attempt to go against the “culturally established”, not caring about what people think.

In the case of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, something similar happens. To help the reader understand what occurred in the Holocaust and to imagine the relationship between Nazis and Jews, the author employs the images of cats and mice as a metaphor. Since we conventionally know that cats are the natural predators of mice (even though I’ve never seen a cat hunting a mouse) we can assert that the cats represent the Nazis chasing and capturing mice, the Jews.

Coming back to graphic novels and its application in classrooms, I’ve discovered that many topics have been covered in graphic novels and would be a great idea to introduce certain contents in the classroom by using graphic novels. Whether it is a serious matter like the Holocaust, one of the most horrible events in history or whether it is a teenage story like the one presented in Ghost World, graphic novels can be a very useful tool to engage students in reading because of both content and format.

Finally here’s the link with the 50 best graphic novels (Ghost World in number 17 and Maus in number 5) in case you are looking for more graphic novels to read, there is a brief summary of each one of them.

https://forbiddenplanet.com/picks/50-best-graphic-novels/

Horror Graphic Novels

I have never liked graphic novels or comics basically because I always thought that they were all about superheroes, and the truth is that I was not completely wrong; the most famous graphic novels or comics are based on superheroes’ adventures, for example, Batman or Watchmen. However, after reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World I realised that there are more than superheroes in the world of graphic novels.

If we take into consideration that Maus is a survivor’s tale and Ghost Wold narrates the story of two teenagers, we can see that deep, sometimes cruel, dramatic, and fun stories can also be part of the graphic novel genre. That is why I want to refer to something different that is horror graphic novels.

I have always liked horror stories and in the Literature course we have not read any. So I did a

research and I found out that there are many horror movies and TV shows based on graphic novels, for example, 30 Days of Night, Tales from the Crypt, The Crow, The Walking Dead, among others. It was a whole new discovery for me. I actually started to read Alan Moore’s From Hell, a novel based on the story of Jack the Ripper.

If there is something I can say to those who refuse to read comics, as I did, is that maybe you should do a research to see that graphic novels cover much more than Batman stories, I am sure you would be nicely surprised. 

For the ones who like horror stories I have a link where you can find many titles and authors. 

                       http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/3033.Best_Horror_Comics_Graphic_Novels_