June 2010

  • Sandman: The Doll's House

    By msarko on 6/30/10 4:19pm
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    When fans and critics discuss comic book art, they're usually just talking about technical skill and character consistency. Is the character gripping his gun realistically? Are the super hero's muscle groups anatomically correct? Is a figure's height comparable in two different scenes? This is why comic art doesn't often get the same treatment as high art or even other forms of pop art. It's art with a function and it is so often viewed as subordinate to the story written around it in speech bubbles and box narration. Sandman is special in this way. The art in the series, while certainly still in a comic book style, is a lot more varied, expressionistic and overall impressive than you'll find in the average comic. The images tell the story just as much as Neil Gaiman's writing.



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  • Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes

    By msarko on 6/24/10 4:26am
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    How does one write a story about a god? This has been the central question of a large part of Neil Gaiman's work. He writes stories about incredibly powerful things, whether they're deities, legendary heroes or the keepers of secrets so important that they could unravel the very fabric of existence. Making a compelling narrative about even a partially omnipotent character is almost impossible. It's no fun to read about a hero who can't die, permanently lose anything of value or fall prey to mortal frailty. Perhaps that's why Gaiman's approach is so thoroughly postmodern. His gods are powerful, but they're also at the mercy of the very beliefs that surround them. It's this core of pop culture deconstruction that makes DC Vertigo's Sandman series so interesting.



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  • Maus: Part Four

    By msarko on 6/17/10 2:49am
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    By telling his story as both a direct account of the Holocaust and as a personal narrative of a Jewish family in 1980's New York, Art Spiegelman provided an example of how the experience of European Jews during World War II echoed through several generations. Few Jews of my own generation can claim great grandparents as most of them were too old to survive the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi rule. This erased not just a generation but an entire history from the lives of millions. Unable to trace their lineage back more than one or two generations, post-war Jews were forced to build new identities from what little they had left. For people like Art Spiegelman, what was left was a family reduced to just a handful of people, all of whom bore the scars of genocide. All of Spiegelman's neuroses, all of his sadness and desperation come with the weight of that unfathomable tragedy.



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  • Maus: Part Three

    By msarko on 6/10/10 1:33am
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    In the first half of And Here My Troubles Began, the second trade paperback compilation of Art Spiegelman's Maus comic strip, Art depicts himself in the mid 1980's when the first half of his award-winning graphic novel was a remarkably successful property. He's drawn as a human wearing a mouse mask, surrounded by other Americans who wear the animal masks of their ethnic heritages. When beset upon by journalists and marketing executives who all want something extra out of the first Maus book, Art literally shrinks into a child in front of them. Maus is every bit Art Spiegelman's search for own his place in the post-Holocaust world as it is a document of his parents' experience during the war. He wonders aloud whether or not he can actually capture the truth of life and death in Auschwitz, whether or not Maus says anything profound, or even anything that hasn't been said already in the countless books documenting Europe under Nazi rule. The responsibility of finding something meaningful in Maus may be up to us readers, not Art Spiegelman. He just recorded his father's words and tried not to spare any details.



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  • Maus: Part Two

    By msarko on 6/3/10 2:23am
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    A lot of Holocaust survivor stories come down to a few good snap decisions and a lot of luck. So many people escaped death at the hands of the Nazis because they just happened to avoid getting caught one night or because they made a friend before the war who was willing to help them when the Gestapo came to town. For Vladek Spiegelman, that was exactly the case. The second half of My Father Bleeds History, the first of two trade paperback compilations of Maus, consists of Vladek watching his family dwindle before his eyes as the antisemitic laws in Poland become more ruthless and the Nazi extermination plan becomes more bald-faced.



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