Literature of Comics & the Graphic Narrative

Moebius      This week, I read Blueberry by Moebius. The first reason I chose his work was that I saw the title, “Miyazaki/Moebius: A Joint Exhibition Catalogue” in the course resource page. I did not know Hayao Miyazaki collaborated with Moebius. I wanted to know how Miyazaki was influenced by Moebius’ work.       When I started reading Blueberry (The trail of the Sioux), it reminded me of the conversation I had with the members of ITEC, which is an theme park design company came to the campus last week. They had experiences of working on European theme parks; and they said, “it is surprising how popular the Old West theme is in Europe. They love cowboys and such!” Therefore, it is understandable that Blueberry is one of the most famous works by Jean Gir (Moebius). However, reading through Blueberry, I realized that the story is not similar to those generic Western themed stories; Blueberry is not a stereotypical cowboy/gunman who suddenly appe...

March by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell      By reading this non-fictional comic March , first of all, I was impressed by how much I learned from one comic book. I didn’t know much about the history of racial segregation (which I really should’ve…only thing I knew were about Martin Luther King Jr. and how those restaurants/restrooms were segregated), thus March was really educational for me. Compared to Maus I read last week, I felt that March was more visually expressive and thus easier to read for me.      While March is about the racial segregation and how the activists fought for their right, the story, especially the episodes of John’s childhood, is pretty personal (such as his episode about how he was attached to the chicken his family owned). And yet, the racism he was experiencing are connected to the well-known ideas of segregation, such as the problems about restrooms, school bus, the quality of school building, and so on. Ther...

Maus and Barefoot Gen      I read Maus by Art Spiegelman and watched Barefoot Gen for this week. The contents of this week were really heavy, especially because they are both non-fictional stories of the tragic events. However, it was definitely a valuable experience for me to read/watch them. It was interesting that how these two works use different approaches to convey the cruelness of war/holocaust to the audience.       Maus is drawn in pretty minimalist style and uses the representation -Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. Despite of its heavy content, I found it fairly easy to read because of this style and representation. Also, I was surprised how the tone (narrative) is quiet and monotonous in Maus; even the expression of the characters are not very explicit. One of the reason behind this settled storytelling might be  that Maus is created from the perspective of Vladek’s son, not Vladek himself; therefore, the tone of...