PX03: The Complete Maus

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman (163x232mm)

I’ve already talked about Maus in this blog series, so I’m not going to go over all that again. But I happen to have the collected edition (in addition to the I and II books), so I thought I’d just have a quick peek and see how they’re printing it these days. (Well, OK, about a decade ago, I guess?)

This edition is from 2003, but this is apparently the 22nd (!) printing. And that’s only the collected edition.

Comparing it with the first printing of Maus II, it looks like the printing plates are getting worn or something. (Collected edition to the right.) The collected edition is on shiny paper while the original is on matte, so you’d expect to be able to see more details, but instead it looks like you’ve got ink bleeding into the white areas.

It’s not very noticeable, though — it’s still quite nice, but… why the shiny paper? It just seems… wrong aesthetically.

The collected edition doesn’t look edited in any way — it’s just a facsimile edition or something.

Anyway. Wasn’t that interesting! No? Darn.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

PX14: Here

Here by Richard McGuire (173x242mm)

“Here” was originally a short piece printed in Raw Vol 2 #1, and was hugely influential: It was a brand new way to tell a story.

So — 25 years later, McGuire expanded it to a three hundred page graphic novel.

If you’ve been living under one of those them there rocks where they don’t have comics, “Here” told the story of a location — we skip back and forth through history, but all the drawings are made from the exact same angle.

So the differences between pages may be small or large…

… and they sometimes tell little narratives.

None of them were very extensive in the original strip, but here they get longer.

And the layout can get pretty convoluted — and you can follow the progression between the different ages and watch people grow up (and old). So — it’s like multi-narrative: There’s narrative between the images, and when turning the pages, too. It’s a fascinating reading experience.

But. While the original short story was “*gasp* it cannot be!”, this is more like… “hm; interesting”. I mean, there’s a lot to enjoy here: The artwork’s good; the colouring’s spot on, the bits are interesting. But it’s like… there’s stuff that annoys, too, like just the way it’s printed. It feels like I have to constantly fight the book not to lose so much in the gutters.

McGuire also makes everything so explicit: We’re being told, several times, that this is a book about history. He even drops in some historians, and he has Benjamin Franklin drop by… and then somebody actually naming him, as if he had no confidence that we’d already guessed that.

It just feels like he had people telling him he should make it more edumacational.

And then he seems to say that the entire book is basically a tour taken in 2213 with space age projectors, which just took all the fun out of it for me.

So, sorry: There’s so much to enjoy here, but that twist just makes it into a dumb sci-fi thing for me.

I can’t remember reading anything negative about the book, though:

Read, watch, or peruse Here in one mood, and you’ll discover a lyrical tribute to those attachments; read it in another, more fatalistic mood, and you might admire even more the varying textures of the lives—the many lives, in one place—that McGuire has made.

So it’s probably just me:

In “Here,” McGuire has introduced a third dimension to the flat page. He can poke holes in the space-time continuum simply by imposing frames that act as trans­temporal windows into the larger frame that stands for the provisional now. “Here” is the ­comic-book equivalent of a scientific breakthrough. It is also a lovely evocation of the spirit of place, a family drama under the gaze of eternity and a ghost story in which all of us are enlisted to haunt and be haunted in turn.

I guess:

In Here, we are a particularly fascinating species of flourishing fauna, a force as elemental in our time as the sun or the ocean. We’ve never seemed so small or so big, so important or so meaningless. Neither have comics. The pink lady remembers why she came in here again, and picks up a small hardcover book.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

PX17: Whatsa paintoonist?

Whatsa paintoonist? by Jerry Moriarty (261x335mm)

The Jack Survives strips were absolutely amazing — strong graphics and moving, mysterious pages. I didn’t know quite to expect from this book — but absolutely not this: Moriarty is drawing from his childhood again: This time around he paints himself in, but as a girl.

So we basically get his (narrative) paintings paired with a dialogue between him and himself.

It evolves slowly, from being quite goofy at the start…

… to becoming very moving. And I love those colours, man.

It’s all about his mother, his father, his sister and his cat: Now all dead.

What!? The School of Visual Arts fired him?

Geez:

He does not sell his art and he does not navigate the world of fine art very adroitly, which may be to his credit. He is not only marginalized, but may be self-marginalizing, which may also be to his credit. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts from 1963, but was “fired” in 2012, being told that the school: “has no need for a class that involves drawing without using photo references.”

*sniff* (That’s his mother, father, sister and his cat welcoming him.)

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.