Exit Wounds

As long as we were reading Jobnik! this week I decided to finally crack open Exit Wounds (by Rutu Modan), another graphic novel about life in Israel (presumably set in the past decade as well) that deals with violence on the fringes of the story but isn't 100% consumed by it.

I'm going to copy and paste the description from wikipedia because it's a good description without a whole mess of spoilers:
"Modan's first full length graphic novel tells the story of Koby Franco, a 20-something cab driver working in Tel Aviv. Franco's mundane everyday life is interrupted when a female soldier approaches him, claiming his estranged father was killed by a suicide bomber at a train station. He and the young woman begin searching for clues to see if Franco's father, whom the soldier was romantically involved with, is dead or alive."

There are some very interesting themes this work shares with Jobnik!  Both stories are concerned with how personal life moves within/in spite of a potentially violent and tense atmosphere.  One would expect that a story about a girl in the IDF during the second intifada would be much more of stereotypical action-packed war story, but it's not.  Exit Wounds throws the same curve ball.  The story is based around a missing father who may or may not have been killed in a suicide bombing, but the story isn't about suicide bombings, the conflict, death, and destruction.  It stays fairly well focused on the interactions of the main character and his family and the female lead Numi.

Exit Wounds also touches on women as members of the IDF.  Numi often discusses how she fits in with other women the expectations of femininity she feels she's not living up to.  Numi feels out of place in her own country in some regards and it reminded me a bit of the feelings expressed by Miriam.

What I found most interesting about reading Jobnik! and Exit Wounds back-to-back was how conflict and stress was just part of the background of the stories.  It says something interesting about the experience of an Israeli or even long-term residents.  The conflict can be overwhelming at times, reach out and affect someone personally, but it's still part of the background.  After so many years in conflict it's almost become part of the day to day noise.

The Role of the Personal Experience in Major Events

A lot of the graphic novels we've read thus far have dealt with foreign times, places, cultures and this week isn't an exception.  Jobnik! gives us a peak into the life of an American girl who joins the Israeli Defense Force just before the second intifada.  The first time I read Jobnik! I had just wrapped up a paper on women in the IDF and I had a relatively good handle on the history of the conflict and the major political issues and players involved.  It made my experience with the book radically different from what I might have had without a lot of background knowledge. I was able to really focus on her story and experiences because I wasn't super confused by the surrounding details of the conflict.

There is this odd, but fantastically descriptive, mix of news reports combined with her worry over Shahar (and others), and how - in the midst of everything - life kind of continues on in small ways in the middle of such events.  The worry, tension, and shock after so long can become a hum in the background [as illustrated by news report text as background on page 58].  Miriam can still be caught up in personal drama, she can still dye her hair, and none of that means that the world around her is unimportant.  It just can't be all consuming all the time for all those involved.

Quite frankly the fact that she chose to incorporate the text of news reports (accurate to the day as described in the author's notes) and still show that she was living day-to-day in her world within the larger conflict is pretty impressive.  If Miriam wasn't so grounded in telling her own story she might have turned the comic into something a bit impersonal - a macro-level history lesson or political diatribe.  Even though on BOS 244 she describes herself as feeling "guilty that [her] comics don't try to go beyond [her] own experience" as I reader I appreciate being let-in on her experiences in such raw detail.

I know the history of the conflict, and I know the events, but I don't know too many personal experiences connected to those events.  There is an important place for stories like these to remind us that the day-to-day doesn't come to a complete halt, even when it looks like everything is in melt down mode.

Overlap

I like that Sfar touched on the way religions can overlap, especially in the same wider tradition (Abrahamic in this case) and in the same geographic region and similar cultures.  I'm referring to the pilgrimage to the Saint/Sufi grave mentioned on pages 83-87.

Sfar's inclusion of this side-trip was probably fed by the current tension in France over (mostly) Muslim Algerian immigration.  It's the author's way of including a contemporary moral, or at least his views on the topic, while keeping in embedded deep within the story set in pre-war Europe and North Africa.  It's cute how Sfar even introduces the character's to each other with the strikingly similar greetings: shalom aleichem and salaam aleikum.

I'm reading into it too much but I find it amusing that the only character's ready to fight over religious claims are the cat and the donkey.  The religious men are perfectly happy to converse, play music, and enjoy each others' company.  Sfar may be hinting that such disputes over religious claims appeal to a more 'animal' territorial nature, whereas "real men of god" (presented as fully human here) are more inclined to celebrate commonalities than devolve into such disputes.  Of course this is just my guessing at Sfar's intentions, without his direct acknowledgment of his motive in these panels I cannot be 100% sure.

Three Parts

I initially thought that The Rabbi's Cat was a bit of a jumbled story.  The cat's role changed a little bit throughout, characters were introduced without a whole lot of resolve (Malka of the Lions), and by Exodus I was thoroughly confused about where this story was headed.  That was before it was brought up in class that it was supposed to be three stories in one book, not chapters leading to one nice-and-neat ending.  I reread it Wednesday night with that in mind got a lot more out of it oddly enough.

That being said I liked the visual style from the beginning.  The use of cursive to express the cat's thoughts, and print to express speech, was creative because it underlined the importance of speech (a greater theme to the whole book, not to mention the 62-66 "cat loses his voice while invoking the name of God" part of the story).  A lot can be said with the font/color of text and I get the impression that as an audience we probably recognize it less than more obvious aspects of each panel.  The font was cursive [I'm old enough to still have had cursive drilled into me so it wasn't difficult to read] and to me, combined with the cat's attitude, it lent an air of snarky confidence.  Cursive looked "smoother" than print and it's perfectly fitting for a cat.

Overall I enjoyed the book and I'll probably have to give it a third read in the next few months to absorb more of it since it was so busy with themes touched on for a moment, so subtly, and then left to move onto a new point.  I liked that it was narrated by a cat - fantastic enough to remind me of stories I liked when I was little, but dealing with themes and points of interest an adult could enjoy.

Real Live Prisoners.

I was surprised to see an actual photo of Vladek toward the end of Maus, especially in a cleaned/fitted prisoner's uniform.  That fact they he took the photo in the uniform kind of hints to either a slight sense of humor that was never extinguished or his desire to have solid evidence in order to remember what those uniforms looked like should his memory fade later on in life.  That fact that he took it for Anja, who obviously knows what the camps and the uniforms looked like because of her own experiences, makes me think it was the former but who can say? 

I was surprised to see a real photo of Vladek none the less.  Maybe it's because after almost two complete volumes I was so used to seeing him as a mouse.  To throw that out there - "Hey, look, remember this is a real person we're talking about here" was slightly jarring and gave me pause.  I suppose that was Art's intention and since he has a history of fusing both drawn and photographic images [as discussed in Comic Book Confidential] I know I shouldn't be surprised.

It certainly had the feel of a modern "period piece" photo; something you'd find at a tourist stop or a theme park.  The fact that it did conjure those feelings was striking.  Not only is this Art pushing out as image of his father to us as the audience but we (or at least I) was forced to really roll the image around in my mind.  I found myself actually thinking through the line of thought that: "This looks like a fake period piece photo but it's not.  It's not just mice, it's people.  It is rooted in reality.  It's not just a comic book full of fantastic fantasy but a retelling of someone's journey through intense trauma."

If this wasn't what Art was aiming for it's still the message that came across for me.

Cultural Jewishness

This is a bit of a throw back to my last update but I think it's certainly post-worthy none-the-less.

A new book is coming out, The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, and it holds the question of Jewishness (in this case, 'cultural Jewishness') front and center.

"What does it mean to be Jewish? To some it means sitting down at Katz's delicatessen with a pastrami sandwich. To others, it's setting up a hilltop outpost in the West Bank and waiting for the messiah. That essential uncertainty, pondered by everyone from rabbis and philosophers to Shakespeare and Sammy Davis Jr., is what Howard Jacobson tackles head on in The Finkler Question.
...
The story revolves around Julian Treslove, a melancholy, lackluster London liberal. After Treslove is mugged one night, he believes, with increasing certainty, that his attacker called him a Jew. Though his best friends are Jewish, Treslove is not. Or at least he's fairly certain he isn't. But as a result of the incident, he becomes increasingly obsessed with the question of Jewishness.
Treslove doesn't approach his journey into Judaism from a religious standpoint. He takes no steps to learn Hebrew or convert. Instead, his obsession is cultural. He wishes to understand the mannerisms of Jewish life; the hidden code of Jewish sarcasm and the subtleties of Jewish body language.
As Treslove yearns to pass as a Jew, many of his Jewish contemporaries in the book do their best to pass as gentiles, including one pitiful character who spends his waking hours trying to reverse his circumcision, chronicling his efforts on a blog, photos and all."
'Finkler' Questions the Meaning of Jewishness - David Sax [All Things Considered]

I quote this article because the commentary on The Finkler Question explores something we see Art Spiegelman exploring in Maus I and II- what exactly makes someone Jewish and to "what extent" are they Jewish (further still, what specifically are the qualifiers and how important is each box that must be checked)?  In the case of Maus, who gets to be painted as a mouse and who just gets a mouse mask; is it fluid?

From my limited understanding there are several different interpretations of Jewish identity.  Honestly?  I think we see this is any minority or even subculture: larger identity in dispute, "truer than you" language, sometimes more laid back interpretations and a general acceptance of splinter/sub-identities.

Mice and Masks

There was a bit of discussion in class over the use of masks in Maus.  While there are many interpretations of the use of masks I find this one the most intriuging:

"Neither Art nor Francoise manifest any affinity for Jewish theology, and they clearly do not buy into the concept of racial Jewishness, but they do feel a deep, albeit guilty, connection to Vladek and what he represents.  So when Spiegelman decides to tell his father's story, he literally paints himself (and all Jews) in the same image..." [BOS 90]

So the masks could be a way of marking shared history either as survivors or attachment to survivors or those who died, and emphasizing third person perceptions (ie Vladek's concern that Anja looked Jewish) without making comment on the ethnicity/religion debate?

In any case the ethnicity/religion debate seems to trouble Spiegelman, or at least this is what some of my classmates, who had read ahead to the second volume, hinted at (specifically where his French-born Jewish-convert wife is concerned).  It's interesting that he would have this conflict in the second volume but not in the first.  Maybe it's because he had time between volumes to think about how he had chosen to depict people?  He may not have wanted to enter the ethnicity/religion debate but his choice of representation in his work kind of forced him to do so, or at least forced him to spend time thinking about it.

In any case it underlines that identity - the ones we choose for ourselves or the ones others marks us with - play a significant role in how we see ourselves and others may or may not interact with us.  In this way Vladek's story, and Art's own story, are quite universal.

Time Tables and Maus

I really enjoyed Maus but my favorite aspect of the graphic novel is usually found at the beginning and end of each chapter where Spiegelman is telling us the story of how he got the stories from his father for this project.  It's a fabulous method of bringing the audience in close in preparation for his father's retelling of his life during the Holocaust.  Personally, it allows me to connect not only with Vladek but Art as well to be privy to the complications and "real life" aspect of their relationship.

It's important (and impressive) because it makes the events in Vladek's retelling more real/more compelling.  I think without skipping between "now" and "then" it would be too easy to disconnect myself from Vladek's story for several reasons: I didn't live through that era; I have never been to Eastern Europe; I'm not Jewish; I don't know anyone personally who went through that ordeal.  It's exceptionally foreign to me so seeing Vladek in a setting more familiar to me (contemporary USA) makes it easier to connect with him.  It's a really fantastic storytelling tool.

While there are numerous tools that Art skillfully wields the one I was surprised at, because I was consciously thinking about it, was the use of mice.  The fact that this is a well established tradition (to emphasize vulnerability) in Eastern European storytelling is quite interesting [BOS 86].  I wonder if Art consciously did that or if it was something passed through culture that he used unaware of the history of the method.

Harvey Pekar and "Fresh Air"

I was interested in Pekar's work The Quitter where he exposing a bit of his childhood and deals more openly with his Jewish background.  I'll probably attempt to get hold of the book sometime but for now I found a 2005 interview with Pekar about his life on NPR's Fresh Air (appox. 20 minutes) that might be interesting.

Toward the beginning of the interview Pekar discusses his family and neighborhood.  His parents were Polish immigrants who were Jewish but he doesn't dwell on that fact too much.  I'm not going to speculate on why he never delved into that.  What he did talk at length about was the neighborhood he lived in - he was one of the only Caucasian kids in a predominately African American neighborhood and high school.  He explains that this is the reason he was singled out and beat up a great deal; he cites as the cause of a few things in his life.

This 'neighborhood' issue has influenced many of the authors/artists detailed in Kaplan's book.  A lot of the authors and artists seem to have come from metropolitan areas and are most likely to work with people they knew at a very local level.  "I went to high school or lived near so-n-so who knew that one guy" sort of thing.(Here's the point where we highlight that they didn't have the internet and didn't have such easy access to people in another city, on another coast).

While some people might wonder at the sizable amount of Jewish people in comics books in the Golden Age and even the Silver Age it makes a great deal of sense and it flushes out Kaplan's assertion that they flocked because it was a creative occupation that was easier to get into.  Business was a who-knows-who network and still is today.  When new mediums and industries arise, like comic books, there tends to be a close network of people at the outset - this one happened to arise out a metropolitan area, with some great Jewish artists and writers, who opened the doors for others at a time of prevalent anti-Jewish discrimination.  Neighborhoods, especially in urban areas, have a great impact for revealing new avenues and shaping perceptions of the world.