Being a publicly admitted comic book fan (graphic novels, if you please) I find that this has been one of the better plotted texts we have read. While I believe that Spiegelman’s initial response to 9\/11 was a blur of confused images, as time went on it formed itself into what we have in front of us now. The fact that it took an enormous amount of time to complete even one panel meant that Spiegelman had to put thought and effort into the tiniest details. In this came small details that others might not have thought of such as dazed pigeons or a street painter who lost his muse because the towers had fallen and destroyed the picture he was painting.<\/p>\n
Cartoons make many images more palpable to the tastes of readers. It’s one of the reasons why they become so entwined in our society. By using the medium of comics, Spiegelman is able to present ideas that many were unwilling to voice after 9\/11 while still making something appreciated by many. Cal it the ultimate collage; harsh social commentary with cute and fuzzy comics (kind of). Page 9 is an especially illustrative of this. The images are confusing but comical, while Spiegelman is dragging newspapers, New York, and even his own displacement through the mud. It is illustrative (ha ha, pun intended) that many of Spiegelman’s illustrations mirror those older comics he displays in the back. As time passed, Spiegelman was able to pull from that which he knew best as a way to cope. While he rants about displacement on page 9, he is doing the exact same thing by attempting to image the same sort of chaos in the comics of the past. Just the fact that the mouse from “Krazy Kat” has come to resemble Osama Bin Laden is just slightly out there to me, but to Spiegelman, this is completely legitimate and also a way to process all that he sees as the aftermath of 9\/11.<\/p>\n
I think that is one of the main reasons Spiegelman created these panels. Yes, I believe that there were WAY too many stories after 9\/11, but this is more than a story. This is one man’s intimate portrait of how the tragedy affected a man and his family and an attempt at some sort of catharsis. In the end, I believe that many people will learn from this, and many people will be completely distanced at the same time. The fact that it took so long to complete is one of the main points. His introduction speaks to this, the fact that he calls on very old comics as further illustrations and the mere fact that the subject matter encompasses issues long after 9\/11 shows the reader that time may be the only real healing process. Spiegelman still seems so pissed off at the end, maybe it’ll take longer, but he at least shows how time helped him<\/em> along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Being a publicly admitted comic book fan (graphic novels, if you please) I find that this has been one of the better plotted texts we have read. While I believe that Spiegelman’s initial response to 9\/11 was a blur of confused images, as time went on it formed itself into what we have in front … Continue reading Time is on my side! (yes it is)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}