Fashionably late

Ack! I forgot again! Sorry Talissa! I work Wednesday nights but given the nature of my job (cardswipe), that's hardly an excuse. So, onto my thoughts for this week. (I promise they're the same ones I had last night.)

I'm finding it hard to come up with an argument based on a graphic novel. It's strange that a medium that was so dear to me when I was younger now strikes me as foreign and critically impenetrable. I confess that I don't know how to close-read a comic book—I've never learned how. I don't even know what's fair game for analysis in Maus. I can't decide whether Spiegelman's visual style is deceptively simple or just simple. There's rarely very much to look at, which forces me to analyze the words—his father's story. But critically? Wouldn't that make me kind of a dick? OK, that was facetious, but still, my point is that since neither the drawings nor the text have much meat beyond their obvious meanings, then my last resort is to look at the interaction between word and image. I could trot out a lot of academic vocabulary at this point, but I don't want to tread water. The fact is that the relationship between the text and the pictures is pretty linear. Art's drawings are loyal to his father's narration; he never tries for ironic juxtapositions between what his father recounts and what he himself thinks. It is, after all, his father's story. Art is just the medium. Polysemy like whoa! But by God, I'm going to find something to write about. I'd sooner write ten pages about the significance of the scene with the rat in the basement than five pages on Equiano. Really.