Just recently read pic related
What did I think of it?
It’s so overrated
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Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
Maus
Just recently read pic related
What did I think of it?
It’s so overrated
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
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Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
Name a not overrated comic.
Seriously Watchmen is not overrated.
And in a weird way, Batman Year One (since TDKR overshadows it)
So you're a capegay. Why should I consider your opinion?
Lol I’m Eurogay, I’m pretty big on French comics as well as American comics.
But unless you’re European I doubt that’s too much of your jam (and don’t tell me you are a quality reader thanks to Image lmao)
It's objectively better than Watchmen (which is mid) so I don't think you should lecture me on quality. I bet you watch MCU movies too.
>I bet you watch MCU movies
This level of cope. No I don’t.
Now explain to me why you think Maus is so great, without using the argument that the subject matters (the Shoah is explained better by actual camp survivors in many other books)
Also the issues with Maus
>godawful drawing
>decides to draw people as animals, hence embracing the Nazi propaganda view (to subvert it but frankly he doesn’t do much with it ans ends up validating it instead)
>Absoluty not a hint of reflection regarding certain decisions of Vladek or the prisoners (ex: the israelites taking part in maintaining the gaz chambers ; could have been interesting to know how they felt or how other prisoners felt about them)
Also, the slice of life in «daily present» of Vladek and his son are gratuitous & self-centered
So you are just this image from the comic?
>perfectly normal questions to this drivel are now unacceptable because I imb4'd them.
Trash logic for trash people.
I actually read this a little bit ago and was meaning to make a thread on it, and I really thought that the present day stuff with the masks was fairly weird and took away from the general feeling of it.
Also having him go into kid form and then back into adult form is just fairly weird when the comic felt a lot more grounded/not fantastical (or as heavy handed with the "man I feel like a kid in this" metaphor that I guess he was trying to get out.)
Like why have the weird in between that tries to "peel away the metaphor" while also being more fantastical????
Other than that I just read it and gone: "Damn."
The art was inspired by the woodcut of Frans Masereel, who made picture stories that preceded comic books.
>Watchmen is not overrated.
I agree. Watchmen is one of the few comics that deserves its accolades.
"Prisoners of the Hell Planet," an earlier comic that makes a cameo in Maus is inspired by Masereel's art. The regular art is deliberately less flashy, he did everything in pen because he wanted it to have the feel of a diary.
>Prisoners of the Hell Planet
To me it looks more like Lynd Ward.
Funnily enough, Even though I do think Maus is overrated, I truly liked „Prisoners on Planet Hell“, both aesthetically & in regard of the emotional impact of the story in such a short amount of pages.
His earlier work in places like witzend and Raw are generally much wilder and more experimental. Maus was his attempt to create a normal narrative, based on his father's stories. If you read the proto-Maus comic he made for Raw, it reads like a Mad Magazine spoof in parts. Also interestingly, the only place that has censored Maus is Israel, because Spiegelman implicated someone as a Nazi informant, and that person's relatives filed charges against it.
Great page. I actually this style better. More detailed and the expression are stricking.
I always felt this was a great example of the animal metaphor not working like Harvey Pekar critiqued it for. Like this is just a very standard depiction of the holocaust except with cartoon animals with makes the whole thing feel like some or dark joke but it's too straight for that. Totally robs the story and real events of their emotional power for me. I think I remember this ends with his father telling about how he went to Mauswitz and it really felt like a punchline.
Agreed, the metaphor doesn’t work, it robs the holocaust of its emotional gravity.
and in a way it’s also a very racist metaphor (as if all israelites were all mice-victims, all Germans are all devilish cats, as if no German resisted, etc)
Being hypocritical and rejecting universal standards is also part of the point.
I've heard the argument that the metaphor is supposed to be flawed and fall apart but I've never understood what the point of that is. Like what is that really adding or saying about Nazi's, israelites, racism, or anything really, what is really adding to the story here? It always just felt like a gimmick to me.
It's not about racism, it's about antisemitism.
The crime isn't killing innocents based on ethnicity, the crime is because it's a specific group.
Still, the anon has a point, the metaphor doen’t add anything to the discussion. And it’s a convoluted metaphor since you say it’s about a specific group, and yet Polish people are all pigs and French people are all frogs, and those are ethnicities, not a specific group
Fair enough I misspoke, but I'm still sticking with my point that the mouse and cat metaphor doesn't make sense even if, or especially, if it's meant to break down. I just genuinely don't see what it's adding. It makes a little more sense in the context of the story told to a child version from the proto-Maus at least but in the final famous version it seems totally out of place.
There are helpful Germans and israelites collaborating with the Nazis in the comic. And the animal device gets more absurd later in the comic, particularly with Swedes being reindeer. I think the metaphor itself is being criticized by the comic, to say that identity is not destiny. Suggesting Israelis would be porcupines is quietly subversive though.
> Suggesting Israelis would be porcupines is quietly subversive though.
Agreed.
Especially in 2024 when Israel acts like Nazi Germany 2.0 against Gaza (not a pro-Arab stance, just factual at this point it seems)
From 2014
Goliath may have been half-blind from a pituitary tumor, and the sling stone to the head may have been super effective due to that same tumor
That and how they're working in something like a kitty litter factory make it a weird read. I really do think he was channeling Mad Magazine and mixing it with childhood stories from his father, before he started doing research and the interviews with Vladek.
I think "self-absorbed" is a more apt term than "narcissistic." Narcissists want attention and adulation, and I don't think that's truly the goal of most autobio cartoonists. Cartooning isn't a good field to get into in the first place if you have a high need for attention. Anyone looking to get published is going to have a strong ego though, autobiographical or otherwise.
>holocaust
>real events
>>>/x/
No, that means you belong on /x/.
I read a lot of his other work including Prisoners and all of it felt far inferior to Maus to me. He also seems intensely narcissistic but I feel that way about most autobiographic comic creators and at lest in his case it's kind of interesting.
He IS incredibly narcissistic!! That’s exactly my point. I feel that he uses his father’s life to talk about his own and create a pedestal for himself.
He doesn’t also approach the Shoah with the necessary humility to me. Tales of camp survivors are so nuanced, because basterds could do kind things in camps and good people could act lile beasts. Communists suddenly acted kind towards Nazis in hope of some bread, while pacifists could become hardened resistants once in a camp. Camp realities are so complex, and yet Art never truly exposes that in Maus, not in a more general and emotional scale. He hides behind the descriptive nature of his father’s life.
Yup, it’s the point, and that’s what I take issue in. Like the other anon’s said, Art is very narcissistic. He uses a historical tale to prop up his own life as worthy of being told. It isn’t
>Vladek and his son are gratuitous & self-centered
Thats part of the point, it seems like most of it went over your head.
Not the guy you're replying to but lets be honest. MAUS and Watchmen are both overrated. Same with Batman. Comics and cartoons in general suck. Same with Manga and Anime.
What would be your top 3 comics then? Not challenging, just curious
I like his interactions with Vladek outside the flashbacks and feel they carry the whole comic
The interaction where Vladek hates taking a Black hitchhiker in his car is gold kek
The comic is about Vladek
Complete schizo insanity and garbage. Just a weird drug addict's perverted mental illness on paper.
Actual schizo.
Part of it was it was one of the first comics to cover serious issues in a very long time due to the silver age
It's kind of odd that we get these type of threads for this, Watchmen and very few other comics, yet practically all other threads ever are moronic bullshit. What do you guys do here outside of these rare threads?
I'm here for the mega threads. Might as well download some classic or even modern cartoons which I never got a chance to watch. I tend to be more interested in french cartoons, although I've been downloading just a lot of older stuff to see how good it is.
I'll do the same with comics, although less so.
I don't care about capeshit and don't care to talk about coomer or pedobait, so there's not much discussion from me on this board.
I can't stand cartoons myself.
Not that I read a lot of capeshit, but I've dabbled in it as I have with almost every other genre in comics.
Good moderation is crucial. I'd prefer a split too, but we'd certainly need good moderation there as well.
We already have generals here, and yes they are awful.
Cartoon-related threads are the most active threads on Cinemaphile, and these are the ones that push obscure comic threads off the board all the time. I don't think mainstream comic threads in a comics board could ever reach those speeds.
OP here.
Cinemaphile is such a disappointing board. I’m only here for comics and storytimes, but out of 100 discussions, you only get 3 or 4 about comics. Rest is pedobait, cartoons I’ve never heard of, or capeshit movies. Sometimes a «why my Robin is better than the 3 others», and that’s shite too.
It’d better to make a solely focused Comics board, and the rest can be left in a separate, hellish place.
I don't know if you want a slower board. All the boards which can maintain a thread for over a day tend to develop general threads, and you DON'T want to have that infecting your board.
Besides, removing the cartoon threads isn't going to produce more obscure comic discussion. If anything, it'll probably just produce more threads about the most generic topic, i.e. capeshit.
Is it Mandela effect that until recently I’ve genuinely always thought the Nazi tilted swastika went the other direction?
Frankly, I've never been able to remember which way it's actually supposed to go. I'm not sure if it's a Mandela effect so much as inattention to detail or some kind of dyslexia.
I liked it, because it was an honest view of events. Breaking down in the second part and directly talking to the audience was an interesting choice, and I got the impression of how impactful the whole story would've been on the author.
If you're looking for a general action story then I agree, it's not good at that. It's also not good at dealing out drama or typical narrative suspense. But not all autobiographical works are going to immediately generate the dramatic pacing that a Homer or Shakespeare knockoff is better at producing.
I'm not really familiar if Maus is biographical or not, but even fictional stories which follow biographical storytelling can be enjoyable, especially since they get more realistic and relatable. Not every situation ends with a dramatic chase scene where the narrator escapes by the skin of their neck at the end.
Notice the author blames a Typhus outbreak for deaths in the camps.
It's fine for what it is.
Avoids the awful black-white of most holocaust narratives.
Art is simple but expressive.
Animal metaphor keeps things from becoming ultra bleak like Night/The pianist.
It's babies first holocaust narrative for teens/YA, but it's competent and ends well.
>It's babies first holocaust narrative for teens/YA, but it's competent and ends well.
This I read it as a teen and just the cover with the hitler cat always stuck with me. I feel like the people nitpicking the cat and maus aspect kinda miss the point though, as some other anons said. It's a fable, in France especially since La Fontaine it's a classic way to express ideas and criticisms. Of course it also has its limits, but satire always has some. It still shows nuances throughout and the mundane aspect of it all. Some anons said it undermined the tragic and the dramatic aspect, but the fact is even though they went through such horrible things, it's still life with its stupid moments, its boring moments, and so on. It's a weird feeling. I recently visited a concentration camp in France and it's really a weird feeling, I'm not sure how to express it.
Musta been in Alsace then? That’s the only place where there’s a concentration camp in France.
Yep, that was the Struthof. I had no idea it was the administrative head of the concentration network in lower germany at the time. Having lived in those areas for work, it changed my perception on them a bit. Very interesting visit
Yes, it's overrated.