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Post by berkley on Jan 3, 2016 19:46:36 GMT -5
Darwyn Cooke: this may be shallow of me but I just don't find his artwork attractive. His characters look squat and pudgy and I can't drum up any interest in what they're doing. Art Spiegelman: Haven't read anything. The highly-acclaimed Maus has never attracted me. I'm probably being totally unfair, but from the excerpts I've read, I don't see what it would add to our understanding of the Holocaust. The whole exercise feels dubious to me. The evil of the Nazis and the horror of the concentration camps seems so apparent that I think this theme has to be treated with great skill and subtlety to make the basis of a full-length work. WG Sebald's The Emigrants, is the best example I can think of from recent decades. Maybe I'll try something else of Speigelman's first and see if that can convince me to give Maus a try. Hal Foster: I'd say he was one of the very best artists ever to work in comics. His style may seem a little static to modern readers (including myself) brought up on the more dynamic action of superhero comics, but a little time effort should enable anyone to appreciate Foster's work, which hearkens back to the detailed illustrations of 19th-century cartoonists trained in fine arts rather than in the more insular world of comics. I haven't read enough Prince Valiant to comment on his wrting. Know what you mean about Foster, and as much as I admire his art, I never found his stories as compelling as I wanted them to be because there was so little action. His panels were more like dioramas. Beautiful, all of them, but the never came to life like those of other, less illustrative artists. Sorry you don't care for Cooke. I find his art evocative of Caniff and Toth and -- if this makes sense -- both realistic and cartoony at the same time. I don't see the squat and pudgy (sounds lie a pair of Golden Age sidekicks!) thing, but, hey, that's what makes horse racing. And, berk, if you ever find the time to read Maus, I think you'll see that Spiegelman does indeed treat the Holocaust skillfully and subtly. Like any historical event, it lends itself to many treatments b/c it's just too large a topic to be able to begin to understand it without coming at it from a multiplicity of viewpoints. One theme of Maus, for instance, is that the Holocaust was not just a spasm of horrific violence that was over and done with in 1945. Rather, it is also like a time-release toxin that has seeped into Spiegelman's parents' bones, essentially become part of their DNA, and has thus become part of Spiegelman's genetic map as well. I'm sure other works on the Holocaust have dealt with this; certainly the similarities between the countless attempts to fathom it are like the constant retellings of traumatic events that all of us do at funerals, on anniversaries, and at family gatherings. Each recounting contains at least a grain of truth and a longing for a way to understand, which is why we tell them again and listen as if we had never heard them. The funny thing about Cooke is that I can see the influences you cite - both of whom I admire - and still don't like particular take on them. I can see the skill with which it's done, but the look of his characters is a turn-off for me aesthetically. Re Mmaus, on the surface - all I can judge since I haven't read it - it,s always looked to me like a heavy-handed allegory that doesn't bring anything of value to the table. What is the point of the Nazis as cats and their victims as mice? Simply that this is a comic and there have traditionally been lots of comics featuring anthropomorphised animals? Not a sufficient reason for their use in this context, seems to me. The predator/prey relationship? Not a good analogy with the Nazis and their victims since predators hunt for food not out of hatred. I just don't see how Spiegelman's choice would help him deal with themes such as the one you mention here. |
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Jan 3, 2016 19:59:03 GMT -5
There are a couple options here. Either one of the best regarded comics of all time (# 4 on the Comics Journal's Best of the 21st Century List) made a bunch of terrible artistic/presentation choices in how to deal with it's subject matter and nobody noticed this except you, despite your handicap of not having read it. Or it didn't. One of these options strikes me as v-a-s-t-l-y more likely than the other. |
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Post by berkley on Jan 3, 2016 20:10:37 GMT -5
My objections are pretty obvious so I'm sure lots of other people must have noticed them. Possibly they put their misgivings to one side, read the book, and came away convinced by that experience. Maybe the same thing will even happen to me if I ever read Maus, but I'm just talking about my current feelings and why I've never felt the urge.
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Jan 3, 2016 20:35:55 GMT -5
It'll probably take you an hour to read book one. It's not super dense.
You've probably spent this long showing us that if you try to judge a work by it's cover (or cursory examination) you're going to end up being completely wrong. Why would so many people think it was great if it was " = a heavy-handed allegory that doesn't bring anything of value to the table?"
It's a multi-tiered narrative about the ripple effect of history (on individual lives especially) and how the linear narrative approach is wrong. It's not ABOUT the Holocaust per se, which is why the animals are used. The Mice/Cats/Pigs are a distancing effect so the horrors are presented more abstractly and not so viscerally, and Spiegelman can make his intellectual argument without the work being drowned by the emotional tragedy of the subject matter.
And then it adds another layer in book two so it's about the three-tiered relationship of creativity, history, and our spiritual/psychological make-up.
There's a lot of other stuff too, but that's my basic 200 word take away of the themes.
(Wouldn't that make more SENSE in a work that's this highly regarded then what you were saying? I mean, logically?)
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Post by berkley on Jan 4, 2016 10:45:12 GMT -5
We all make decisions on which books we're going to read and of course those decisions are made before we read the book - necessarily! What I was saying was meant strictly as a description of some of the reasons I haven't felt compelled to read Maus up to now, not as a final judgement on the book's value - you'll notice I did concede that my opinion could very well change if I ever do get around to giving it a read.
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Post by Arthur Gordon Scratch on Jan 4, 2016 12:21:49 GMT -5
Maus is as much if not more about family, heritage, generational gaps as it is about the holocaust. I read it when I was 13 and have yet to find any work of fiction/auto-fiction as powerfull as this. When glancing at the chosen panels and pages on this thread, I noticed that I didn't get a fraction of the impact the global work actually has, so I went to re-read it and was back to my ususal awe of the work.
About Darwyn Cooke, there's another aspect of his work that might cause some friction : as much influenced it is by Kirby, Toth or Caniff, its biggest influence remains animated cartoons, as Cooke himself came from that background with the 90ies Batman series. I can get it might be distracting in some way when youre reading a comic book. But I grew over this and also enjoys it now, especially since his storytelling and plots usually agree with me.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 4, 2016 17:46:57 GMT -5
Patch job....having disqualified my previous entry. So I'll simply choose Jim Starlin, for creating the first Marvel original graphic novel, The Death of Captain Marvel.  |
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Post by Cei-U! on Jan 4, 2016 19:06:50 GMT -5
Noted. Thanks, Jez!
Cei-U!
I summon the recount!
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Post by berkley on Jan 4, 2016 22:30:50 GMT -5
About Darwyn Cooke, there's another aspect of his work that might cause some friction : as much influenced it is by Kirby, Toth or Caniff, its biggest influence remains animated cartoons, as Cooke himself came from that background with the 90ies Batman series. I can get it might be distracting in some way when youre reading a comic book. But I grew over this and also enjoys it now, especially since his storytelling and plots usually agree with me. That would make sense: I have never liked the Bruce Timm style of animation in most of those DC cartoons from the 90s and later. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 4, 2016 22:52:10 GMT -5
About Darwyn Cooke, there's another aspect of his work that might cause some friction : as much influenced it is by Kirby, Toth or Caniff, its biggest influence remains animated cartoons, as Cooke himself came from that background with the 90ies Batman series. I can get it might be distracting in some way when youre reading a comic book. But I grew over this and also enjoys it now, especially since his storytelling and plots usually agree with me. That would make sense: I have never liked the Bruce Timm style of animation in most of those DC cartoons from the 90s and later. I...I...I have no words. |
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Post by berkley on Jan 5, 2016 0:43:08 GMT -5
That would make sense: I have never liked the Bruce Timm style of animation in most of those DC cartoons from the 90s and later. I...I...I have no words. I think it's his top-heavy male heroes that especially turn me off. They just look ridiculous to me, especially in contrast to the relatively realistically proportioned female characters - not to mention their own bottom halves! Not that Cooke is guilty of emulating that particular aspect of Timm's animation. |
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