I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Weeks 6-7: Art Spiegelman, Maus

I resisted assigning Maus in my literature classes for almost a decade, not because I was afraid of the subject matter but because I was afraid students would think I was only teaching it for the subject matter, and might read it the same way. When I first started teaching, Maus was still "the" graphic novel for too many gatekeepers: the exceptional one, the one that rose above its crass peers. The Ursula K. LeGuin of comics. After my second semester of slipping a graphic novel onto the syllabus (V for Vendetta, in that case) a student asked why I didn't teach Maus instead; my silent resentment probably delayed my acceptance of inevitable by another couple of years.

But accept it I did, once I started teaching the American literature readings classes in Howard's graduate program. If I could only justify teaching one graphic novel in that sequence of courses, it was going to be Maus.

Don't ask me what I would've done if Alan Moore had been born in Northampton, Massachussetts.

I've taught Maus in a couple of grad classes now and I thought I'd gotten it down to a science, but teaching it to a room full of undergrads has opened the comic up again; I had a remarkable experience a couple of weeks ago as my opinion of Artie (the character, not the author) changed in the middle of class.

In the grad classes we had to cover Maus in a single session, most of which was devoted to Spiegelman's visual storytelling and his animal metaphors. That left just enough time to consider Spiegelman's deliberately unpleasant self-representation as Artie, discussing it as an authentication strategy that validates everything Spiegelman says by painting him in such an unflattering light that we assume it has to be honesty--but the assumption is always that Artie is a callous, self-involved jerk for most of the novel. I'm always particularly troubled by, and I take particular care to mention, the passage in "Time Flies" when Artie (or is he Art, since this is the only part of the book set after the publication of Maus I?) visits his shrink and the shrink tells him that Vladek took his survivor's guilt out on him, Artie, "the REAL survivor."

I've always thought that was an appalling statement. He is a survivor, certainly, of his mother's suicide and of all the Holocaust traumas that have been projected on him and passed down to him secondhand. But the survivor? The real survivor? Did Pavel really say that? Why did Spiegelman include that? Depicting his own selfishness might authenticate his story, but having another character--a doctor and a Holocaust survivor--validate his self-centeredness appears, at first glance, to justify his own egocentrism.

This time around, though, we had two weeks to sink into the book, and as my students defended Art/Artie it became clear that among all the other traumas Art Spiegelman has had to survive, he's also had to cope with the other characters' implicit or explicit judgments that he doesn't suffer any problems at all. This dilemma has been part of the story since the second page ("...THEN you could see what it is, friends!"), but it really goes back to "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," the wholesale inclusion of which now seems even more brilliant. In that comic, Artie only gets about two panels to mourn his mother's death before he's expected to comfort a devastated Vladek and make the funeral arrangements, and then his father's grief sucks up all the oxygen in the funeral, and when Artie finally gets a chance to cry some asshole friend of the family tells him that he's  too late and he should have cried when Anja was still alive. Maus keeps reminding us that Artie wasn't allowed to express grief and sorrow and anger at his own tragedies; whatever he's endured, Vladek and Anja will always have endured more. His problems might pale in comparison to theirs, sure, but they're still his problems and he's got to live with them. And nobody but Francoise, and Pavel, will even give him credit for that.

That line about "the REAL survivor" still rankles, but the longer time for class discussion and the good efforts of my students were useful for highlighting all the reasons why the egocentric Artie of MAUS is not just a clever strategy for stressing Spiegelman's honesty but a trauma survivor who isn't even allowed to think of himself that way. I'm grateful for the chance to have taught it to a large class of attentive and engaged undergrads. I'm learning as much about these comics as they are.

Other developments were more expected. I doubt that any class dedicated to Maus has ever shied away from discussing those questionable animal metaphors and this one was no exception as the students immediately pounced on the troubling implications of representing religious and ethnic groups as animals. I did find it odd how they would speculate on the reactions of some hypothetical Jewish reader who didn't want to be compared to a mouse--a laudable attempt at identifying with someone else's point of view, I guess, but after a while I had to ask why they weren't simply talking about their own reactions. Those are usually much more fascinating than the responses of that ideal, easily-offended reader, whose only mission is to be offended easily.

I sometimes wonder if this generation of students has been trained to identify stereotypes too easily, and to the exclusion of all else, as if simply finding a stereotype settles everything about the work in question. The brilliance of Maus--one of its brilliances, anyway--lies in the way that it always unsettles us, always forces us to question its own metaphors, always forces us to look at its dramatic and creative dilemmas from a new angle.

Even if we've been teaching it for a couple of years.

Twelve Hours of the Night

Week five didn't happen (thanks for nothing, El Nino), so to fill in here's a little bonus material that never quite worked its way from the lecture notes to the actual lectures. Not that it should have; this is stuff I find fascinating as a reader of Watchmen but I'm not sure how much it would matter to a new student of comics.

When I reread Watchmen last spring, one of the features that most jumped out at me was the use of different formal and thematic structures for each individual issue. Some of them have always been obvious and some of them surprised me, but it's the kind of feat that only becomes apparent when you read the collection as a whole--a brilliant fusion of the periodical format of the individual comic books with the unified narrative of the graphic novel. Some of these styles would never be apparent until the whole series was completed, collected, and reread.

As I prepared to teach Watchmen I tried to identify each issue's distinctive structure and style. I was most interested in the "neutral" issues, the ones told in what we've all come to think of as the Watchmen style of ironic word/image juxtapositions and comics-within-the-comic, to see whether they actually diverged from one another. I came out of it with an even greater appreciation of Moore and Gibbons' skill in designing twelve issues that are as unique as they are unified. Here, as best as I can determine, are the twelve styles of Watchmen:

Chapter I is built around Rorschach's preliminary investigations, which provide a tour of the rest of the cast--one half of the Citizen Kane formula.

Chapter II supplies the other half with Kane-style postmortem flashbacks of Blake's life through the people who (barely) knew him.

Chapter III is the first issue to assemble all the elements of the Watchmen style, including Tales of the Black Freighter panels used as commentary on the main plot. Beyond that, the issue is marked by a dramatic increase in the use of parallelism and irony between text and image and between different strands of the plot (such as Janey Slater's all-too-timely commentary matching Laurie's departure, or the Black Freighter panels and captions). This isn't the first chapter to use irony but it may be the most overtly, relentlessly ironic.

Chapter IV is organized around Jon's memories and flashforwards, of course, representing Jon's perception of time and the deterministic structure he assigns to the universe (even if the flashbacks suggest that Jon simply allows himself to be directed, before and after the accident).

Chapter V is the symmetrical issue, filled with in-panel reflections as well as the mirrored layouts, a fitting representation of Rorschach's dualism.

Chapter VI shows Rorschach’s therapy sessions, filtered through the notes of Dr. Malcolm Long and the random, meaningless inkblots.

Chapter VII gives us a breather at the midpoint. The issue is free of narrative games and especially the nonlinear timelines of other issues. It's built around unities of time (everything happens in a single night) and action (getting Dan back into costume and rebuilding his confidence) and it almost holds to a unity of place. No flashbacks, no Black Freighter, and precious little ironic contrast outside of the television broadcast. The closest thing to a recurring formal device is the fairly tame symbolism of the lenses and screens that keep framing, reflecting, and watching Dan. Chapter VII's style is an apparent stylelessness that only reads like a deliberate choice against the more overt formal games of the other chapters. Young Marc was bored by this one but now I find it's no less virtuosic for its restraint, and a welcome change of pace.

Chapter VIII goes back to the default Watchmen style of parallelism and ironic juxtaposition, and while the timeline is linear it skips forward pretty dramatically to cover all the time that's passed in the other plotlines since Chapter V. As with Chapter III, though, it doesn't just use the default style evenly: this one emphasizes the assembly of pieces to discern the whole, with lots of characters connecting bits of information to form a larger narrative. Sometimes they do it accurately (Hollis Mason working out who saved the people from the fire, Dan working his way up the corporate structure of Pyramid Deliveries from his computer, Detective Fine working out Dan's secret), sometimes they're disastrously wrong (the knot-tops deciding a retired auto mechanic sprang Rorschach from prison), sometimes they're both (the New Frontiersman, pasted up before our eyes). On a probably unrelated note, this is also the issue with the most conventional, unironic use of superhero action and conventions. A Young Marc favorite, and still a reinvigorating jolt of energy and purpose after seven chapters of moping.

(This has nothing to do with the chapter structures, but I have to add: there is something awfully heroic about fat, out-of-shape Dan Dreiberg manning up and fighting to save his friend and the world, even as his girlfriend spends the whole chapter talking about her godlike ex. He's so determined, in Jon's absence, to find human solutions to human problems. Too bad that resolution withers in the face of Veidt's horrific solution.)

Chapter IX is a symmetrical counterpoint to Chapter IV, taking us back to Mars and focusing on Laurie’s memories. Continuing the Chapter VIII's themes, this issue shows Jon and Laurie assembling random events to discover a larger pattern, but on a more cosmic scale.

Chapter X is back to the default, but this time it distinguishes itself by creating a unique theme rather than emphasizing one element of the common style. It's built around descents into various underworlds--NORAD, Karnak, Archie under the river, Happy Harry's underworld bar, Adrian's funereal office, Antarctica, the death of Max and Hira.

Chapter XI is one of the strangest. This issue has a few pages set in the intersection, the location that receives the most typically Watchmen-like treatment of ironic parallelism and metacommentary, but the focus lies elsewhere: Adrian's autobiography, the simultaneous inputs of his channel-surfing, and the simultaneous convergence and explanation of different strands of the plot. It's another issue of parts assembling to form the whole, as we might expect of the chapter where the murderer explains how and why he done it, but something else is going on. The issue is built like Adrian's "jigsaw-fragment model of tomorrow," giving us a fair approximation of how the world's smartest man thinks, putting us inside Veidt's mind. (Note that Veidt's story is broken up between two different audiences; only he and we get to put them together.)

With the climax happening at the end of Chapter XI (or, technically, the beginning of Chapter XI), Chapter XII covers the aftermath, the denouement, and the continuing story. Another linear issue, with Jon's extratemporal perceptions viewed solely from the outside (those tachyons are still muddling things up) and lots of reminders that the story doesn't end when the pages run out. Although we also get a few circular images that take us right back to the beginning.

I'm not thoroughly convinced of all these descriptions; I am convinced that Moore and Gibbons have given each chapter an identity all its own, emphasizing different elements of their collaborative style to give us twelve comics that are as accomplished individually as they are  collectively.

Weeks 3-4: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen

If Understanding Comics is the book that showed me I could study comics, Watchmen is the book that made me want to.

Like a lot of Moore's best comics, Watchmen is both an adolescent work and an adult one, more beholden to convention than it lets on and determined to provide generic thrills along with more cerebral pleasures. I was lucky enough to hit adolescence just as Watchmen was coming out, when it could satisfy my dual desires to read a superhero comic and grow into something more challenging. It wasn't alone in filling that niche--Frank Miller was there, too, and Moore's other work, and later Grant Morrison's first American comics. But more than any other single comic book, Watchmen held out the promise that comics could grow up with me. Which, thanks to a couple of accidents of history, they did.

I read Watchmen so many times those first couple of years that I didn't read it cover-to-cover again for close to twenty. After a couple of decades of pulling out the greatest hits (the prison break first, then the Rorschach issue and the Citizen Kane wake for the Comedian and the symmetrical issue, then finally Jon's issue, "Watchmaker") and ruminating on them in isolation I decided it was time to dive back in and read it as it was supposed to be read. Not so much because the movie stirred up old memories but because my 1987 trade paperback, loaned to many friends and consulted countless times, was falling to pieces and the recoloring by John Higgins seemed like a great excuse to buy a new copy.

Watchmen was not well served by 1980s printing techniques and those lurid hues always contradicted its claims to subtlety and maturity. Even Tales of the Black Freighter, which was supposed to be lurid, was fatally compromised by a crude palette that gave the mariner's decomposing shipmates the color scheme of a box of Froot Loops. Comics have finally caught up with Moore and Gibbons, in at least this one technical matter, and we can finally see Watchmen as it was meant to be seen. I'm not a huge fan of ironic Benday dots as a shortcut to instant nostalgia, but Higgins' use of the primitive patterns helps to pop the Black Freighter images and captions out of Gibbons' busy panels and distinguishes the comic-within-a-comic from the world around it.

The change is even more profound in scenes like Dr. Manhattan's march through Vietnam--a scene of special power for me because it was the first glimpse of Watchmen I ever had, in one of those "Pow! Zap!" articles that ran in Newsweek circa 1986. A superhero, because a man of that physique and size and unnatural shade of blue could be nothing else, was striding across a burning landscape, creating mushroom clouds with the same casual gesture that might attend the selection of a photograph or the creation of man. Two terse captions promised that this child's fantasy would be directed toward grown-up subjects with their brazenly false history of the war that we weren't supposed to talk about, that we always kept talking about. This was the image that made me want to read Watchmen before I would have been able to handle it, the image that said it was a teenager's book and an adult's. To see it in the new edition, shorn of its pastel pinks and piss yellows, now wrapped in purples that turn a sunlit moment of triumph into a twilight of the gods: I felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken.

That was last April. I had no intentions of rereading the book again for the graphic novel class but by the time I hit "Watchmaker" my judicious skimming had turned into complete immersion. I didn't even hold out until my own primal scene; Jon staring at that photograph was enough, or maybe his departure the chapter before. You had me at "At play amidst the Strangeness and the Charm." Truth to tell, you had me at the dog carcass in the alley, tire tread on burst stomach.

Teaching works you love always runs the risk that your own enthusiasm will impair your judgment of what your students need to know, or worse, that you'll get angry at your students because they don't share your enthusiasm. Neither has been a problem for this class. Whether they're coming to the story for the first time or they've also been reading it since they were teenagers, they've been as eager to discuss Watchmen as I am. If I personally have little interest in some of the things they wanted to talk about--we can only debate whether Veidt was "right" or "wrong" because the circumstances of his ethical dilemma are so utterly contrived to begin with, a late-night dorm-lounge bull session brought to life--I was still happy to let them go there as a way of giving them some responsibility over the discussion and as a way of opening up the areas I did want to cover. And they were equally willing to tackle those areas: the formal techniques, the genre criticisms, the clashing ideologies that animate each of the major characters.

That's more or less the order of how we tackled Watchmen, starting with how to read it and what contexts to read it in before building up to the themes and ideas that make it worth reading in a classroom. The capstone of the lectures was a look at the comic's conflicting ideas about meaning and purpose in the universe--Blake's nihilism, Jon's makerless mechanism, Rorschach's morally blank world ordered by our own arbitrary scrawls, and the thermodynamic miracles that only become visible from a more distant perspective or, paradoxically, a more intimate one. That forced us to bring the comic's form and design back into the discussion, tying the lectures together so neatly you'd almost think they were designed that way. When in fact they had about as much advance planning as the smiley face on Mars.

Not too bad considering I worked them up on the fly while I was busy rereading a comic I have been reading for twenty-two years instead of drawing up lesson plans. This is what expertise is, I suppose: the knowledge that you don't have to draw up in lesson plans because you have been absorbing it and processing it your entire life. The knowledge that you pick up while you're doing something else. It's a little embarrassing to discover that I'm better qualified to teach Watchmen than I am to teach the books I wrote about in my dissertation, but I guess that just means I'm in the right place, the right classroom, at long last.