COMICS JOURNAL (Essay) - Graphic Memoirs

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Understanding and Improving Self Through Graphic Memoirs

Book List
     Maus I: A Survivor's Tale (Art Spiegelman)

     Fun Home (Alison Bechdel)

Most of the people tend to limit their understanding of comics and graphic novels to fictions and superhero stories. It may be influenced by the success of the Marvel’s movies. However, superhero stories are no longer dominating the comics’ world. Other genres such as underground, war, autobiographical, and memoirs are getting attention and worth exploring, especially the graphic memoirs. Graphic memoirs are sequential art expressing the author’s autobiographical stories, social and cultural experiences, and self-awareness and evaluation. Through the graphic memoirs, the authors can express their point of view through pictorial art such as Spiegelman portrayed the German soldiers as cats and Jews as mice during the Holocaust period, recognize their identity such as Bechdel openly accepted herself as a lesbian, share stories of their loved one respectfully even it is related to death such as the suicide of Spiegelman’s mother and Bechdel’s father. Graphic memoirs not only provide the artists, authors, writers, and creators a channel to express their emotion and perspectives but also inspired readers to learn and think about some controversial social issues, history, relationships, self-awareness, identity crisis, and then look for ways to improve the self and the world.

Recognizing the self, avoid identity crisis

All individuals have feelings, emotions and concerned very much about their own identity. Graphic memoirs guide readers recognize and express their identity and provide reference solutions on dealing with the identity crisis. Art Spiegelman was born after the World War II but to express his strong emotion on how his race, the Jews, was treated badly and unfairly during the Holocaust period, and how his parents survived in the war, he created the Maus. Spiegelman’s father and mother were well off before the war, but the WWII stole away all of their wealth, their prime, their trust of people, and lives of their loved one such as their son Richiev. Their personality also changed after the war. Being a Jew, Spiegelman wants to record his parents’ wartime experience so that the next generations and even the world will never forget how destructive the war could bring to the human society. For instance, the long-term psychological burden eventually led Spiegelman’s mother to commit suicide. Spiegelman felt guilty and responsible for her death for a long time. During wartime, Spiegelman’s father Vladek had to hide his mouse identity by wearing a pig’s mask as the Polish people in order to avoid being caught and sent to concentration camp. Through illustrating his parents’ wartime stories, Spiegelman and his father finally could face the war experience, family tragedy, and his father’s personality deviation before and after the war in a more positive way.

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel reviewed how her childhood events helped her recognized her actual sexual orientation and accepted herself as a lesbian comfortably. She believed in herself, she acted the way that most proper and comfortable for her, and did not lie about her actual sexual orientation. On the contrary, her father, Bruce, felt ashamed of being homosexual and kept himself in the closet that even his wife did not know about it. His sexual orientation and taste were found in many daily activities such as selecting girly wallpaper and make everything neat, tidy, and clean. However, he never identified his real feeling and orientation. He died two weeks after Alison comes out. Alison believed that he was committed suicide due to the identity burden he gave himself.

When people have identity crisis due to their race such as Spiegelman, or having contradiction to the society’s norm such as Bruce, people may choose to hide themselves, face it emotionally as Spiegelman, or even end their lives such as Alison’s father. The real stories from Spiegelman and Bechdel raised readers’ awareness about the negative side of hiding one’s identity. The may choose devastating approach such as ending one’s life, or a positive approach such as expressing his emotions through graphics and animal representations such as Spiegelman. These graphic memoirs teach readers that positive approach always wins. For example, Alison received recognition and support from her community after she comes out. Therefore, graphic memoirs such as Maus and Fun Home let the readers who are facing similar situations understand that they are not alone and there are always supports, solutions, and different approaches to deal with the crisis.

Express with metaphors

Telling things straightforward may be boring. Therefore, the authors in graphic novels always use metaphors to make the stories more interesting and memorabl. At the meantime, readers are required to complete the missing parts with closure to make sense of the stories. So, readers may find it more entertaining when there are metaphors because they are more involved in the memoirs. In addition, visualizing the metaphors with pictorial allows the authors fully express their creativity and emotions through graphics. It is not only fun for the readers but also an expressive way to help the creators show their point of view of something and review it in a more objective way and receive feedback from the viewers.

For example, In Maus, Spiegelman portrayed the German soldiers as cats and the Jewish people as mice to evoke readers’ major premise about the fear generated from the animals’ relationship and apply it to the story. Mice’s natural enemies are cats because they will eat them once they found the mice. Through this implication, Spiegelman did not need to write or draw explicitly how the Jewish people were scared during the Holocaust because what animal representing them already implicitly informed the readers. Therefore, readers understand immediately when the pigs first appear on page 27 representing the Polish soldiers and people and cats first appear on page33 representing the German soldiers. Without the pigs and cats representation, Spiegelman has to explicitly inform the readers who are the soldiers in every panel. So, graphic memoir is a great medium to make readers quickly and easily understand the implicit meaning that the authors want to express in the narrative. As a result, the reading process becomes smooth and fun.

In Fun Home, the myth of Daedalus (the father) and Icarus (the son) at the beginning and end of Bechdel’s graphic memoir motivates the readers to think deeper about her relationship with her father because their relationship is opposite to the Icarian game. The Greek mythology of Daedalus and Icarus is about father-child relationship. Daedalus is the father and made wings of wax for his son Icarus. He warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun but Icarus still flew too close to the sun. As a result, he fell into the sun as the wings melt. For Bechdel, she thought her father is Icarus who fell into the sea and died. At the beginning of the story, Bechdel is the child that asking her father to make her fly. At the end of the story, Bechdel’s father was in the water opening his arm. She knew that he was there to catch her. In this ending, her father is more like Icarus who died too early. Bechdal used this allusion to express her acceptance, love, and emotion toward her father. Therefore, using metaphors in graphic memoirs gives readers a stronger feeling and more involved in the stories.

Response to tragedy

Graphic memoirs are not fictions; they are realistic stories that the authors want to share with readers. Both Spiegelman and Bechdel lost one of their beloved parents and have to find a way to survive from the bad emotions and avoid breaking down. Spiegelman’s mother killed herself while Spiegelman was out for work. His mother was mentally unstable sometimes that his father and he must comfort her whenever the situation happened. That day Spiegelman went home late. His father found his wife committed suicide before Spiegelman arrived home. They broke down and Spiegelman felt guilty and responsible for the suicide because he thought if he went home earlier, he would be there to save her. Therefore, for a long period of time, he was trapped in the bad emotion and lived like a prisoner who cannot escape from the tragic event. He published this comic book that record the tragedy of his life underground. Through expressing his feeling through graphics, he eventually escaped from the prison. He turned it into energy to fuel him to create a comics that illustrates his parents love stories and experiences during the Holocaust period and name it Maus. It was widely read and received many awards. Graphic memoirs helped artists and writers to understand their pass and present and then improve their future development.

Likewise, Bechdel was sad about his father’s death because she believed that his father had committed suicide because of his homosexuality. Bechdel comes out and accepted herself as a lesbian. She would be happy if her father was there to support her and still alive. She portrayed herself as Icarus at the beginning but shifted to Daedalus after her father’s death. This is because she knows the truth of her wings and she knows the dangerous when flying too close to the sun. So she flies to where is safe for her and accept her identity. She felt sad because his father did not understand his wings and finally fell into the “water”. Despite the tragic event happened to her family, she has the faith that one day when she comes close to the water and going to fall, her father must be there to catch her. She used the graphic memoir, Fun Home, to help her express how she feels about the tragedy, how she thinks about her father’s death, and how she deals with her future. Funeral service is their family business and this story is about the death of her father. So she used the word “Fun” with the implication of funeral and death as the book title.

Respect

Things change over time, so as personality. Like Spigelmen’s father, he was a charming and generous young man before the war but became a selfish and bad tempered old man after the war. If Spiegelmen did not understand what his father had experienced decades ago, he would never understand why his father collected trash such as wires that someone throw away and wasted days for repairing old stuff. His father had experienced the scarcity of food and materials that he understood everything is precious and should not be thrown away easily. Likewise, Bechdel did not appreciate her father as he spent too much time on decorating the house and choosing girly wallpaper and furniture. However, after learning from her mother that her father was homosexual, and her father admitted that he was unhappy to be a boy instead of a girl when he was born, Bechdel finally understood why his father had such taste and behavior. Both Spiegelmen and Bechdel learned more about their fathers after illustrating their stories through graphic memoirs and respect the change and difference of their fathers’ tastes and strange behaviors. Therefore, graphic memoir is a good way to help people review and learn from the past, as well as moving positively toward the future with respect.

Every individual may experience some level of social injustice, cultural misunderstanding, identity crisis, relationship problems, and conflicts. Many artists and authors use the graphic memoirs to share their real stories in an interesting way in order to encourage those who have similar situations to think objectively, critically, and positively. It does not require skillful drawings because simple black and white illustrations as Maus can be a successful narrative. Instead of using long and complicated word descriptions, graphic novels allow creators to use simple graphics to represent a complicated idea implicitly. Therefore, graphic memoirs are becoming more and more popular and many people are motivated to become one of the graphic memoir authors.

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