Spoke too soon

As the title says, it turned out I had enough time to churn out at least one more blog entry before the end of the semester. To really prove that this is the end, I'm using the last panel from McCloud's Understanding Comics. My true closing note is how--at the risk of sounding too corny, both Understanding Comics and The Graphic Novel class have changed my perspective in just the new things I see and read, but also with older materials. Over the weekend, I came across an old Calvin and Hobbes collection at a library. I didn't really appreciate Calvin and Hobbes when it first came out, primarily because in its short time, my basic reading skills were not perfected yet. Now, apart from its now and then politically loaded messages and parodies, his personal style varies. Reality is depicted with jagged yet open lines, possibly to show a depressed reality from a child's perspective, while the scenes in Calvin's imagination have heavy shadowing and more realistic details.

One Final Note?

With the semester almost over, I would use this possibly last blog entry to make some of the relations between every book we have read in The Graphic Novel class to various moments in storytelling, guest speakers and visual gags found within the television series, The Simspons. I will list these examples in accordance with the season they premired in. Starting with the season 13 episode, Blame it on Lisa. The family has just traveled to Brazil to look for an orpahn boy was sponsoring. While they're in Brazil, they a disturbingly suggestive kids show "teleboobies" and in a similar fashion to the scene in Safe Area Gorazde where they are watching the horrors of the Bosnian war on TV and the audience only sees the reactions of the faces watching the movies, so to do we only see the mixed reactions of the family watching the TV when the female host goes "ON top of, beneath."--draw your own conclusions. Fast forward to season 16's, Treehouse of Horror XV. In the third segment, In the Belly of the Boss, which parodies the Fantastic Voyage, the Professor, Frink, warns them:"Look out for retroviruses, oh boy, are they retro!"(holds up a picture of a virus in a "keep on truckin' pose) "It's a crazy design by R. Crumb, who was friends with Harvey Pekar...Seriously, touch one and you die." Moving on to season 19's Husbands and Knives. A new comic book store opens and they have three comic book artists come by for a public signing (Seriously, all three artists did lend their voices to their animated counterparts): Art Spigelman of Maus fame, Alan Moore of Watchmen fame, and David Clowes of Ghost World Fame. and finally, possibly the funniest example of juxtapositioning came from the current 20th season episode, Homer and Lisa Exchange CrossWords. Early in the episode, Lisa has become so addicted to crossword puzzles that she is unable to carry on a conversation without being reminded of a clue she needed for her puzzle: "Oh, Thanks Bart (gasp) "barge--A large San Francisco people mover!" At this point, Bart turns away from Lisa and goes: "Speaking of Large San Francisco people movers..." the scene immediately cuts to a hardcore gay bar.

You're Journeying through another dimension...

Upon reading book 2 of Maus, I am reminded of a particular episode of The Twilight Zone: Episode 74, Deaths-Head Revisited. Here's the opening by Rod Serling (they just don't have writers like this anymore, bear in mind it was 1961 when this was written):

"Mr. Schmidt, recently arrived in a small Bavarian village which lies 8 miles west of Munich, a picturesque, delightful little spot one time known for its scenery but more recently related to other events having to do with some of the less positive pursuits of man: human slaughter, torture, misery, and anguish. Mr. Schmidt, as we will soon percieve, has a vested interest in the ruins of a concentration camp--for once, some 17 years ago, his name was Gunther Lutze. He held the rank of a captain in the S.S.. He was a black-uniformed strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain, and like his colleagues of the time he shared the one affliction most common amongst that breed known as Nazis: he walked the earth without a heart. And now former S.S. Captain Lutze will revisit his old haunts, satisfied perhaps that all that is waiting for him in the ruins on the hill is an element of nostalgia. What he does not know, of course, is that a place like Dachau cannot exist only in Bavaria. By its nature, by its very nature, it must be one of the populated areas of the Thilight Zone."

As stated in that opening, a former Nazi captain, Lutze, visits the remains of Dachau; but when he gets there, he is haunted by every last soul that was tortured and or killed and Lutze's punishment is to suffer the same horrors the slaughtered have, not physically, just feel their pain in his head. This causes Lutze to go insane and the doctor taking Lutze away to a mental hospital asks: "Dachau...Why does it still stand?"

Cue the closing narration:

"There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus, the Belsens,the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes--all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone, but wherever men walk God's earth."