In this thesis, I consider the causes and effects of the success of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-1991) and chart the formal directions in which comics have subsequently moved historical representation. To do so, I conceptualize realism alongside the work of Fredric Jameson, Erich Auerbach, and Ernst Gombrich as a field of struggle in which different representational conventions strive to be perceived as realistic. With this approach to realism at hand, I undertake an academic reception study of Maus in order to show how its success resulted in a conception of historical representation in comics as uniquely suited to a subjective mode of realism. In the three case studies that follow, I challenge this all too narrow view of comics’ capabilities for historical representation by demonstrating that the depiction of the past in comics draws on the medium’s ability to render the past in densely layered combinations of subjective, historiographic and mechanic modes of realism in texts and images. By analyzing the way in which different modes of representing the past are brought together in Peter Pontiac’s Kraut (2001), Greg Pak and Carmine di Giandomenico’s Magneto: Testament (2008-2009), and Shigeru Mizuki’s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths (1971), I not only show that the medium’s affordance for historical representation is much broader than is often assumed, I also uncover World War II comics as reflections of the impact of an ever-widening media landscape on the remembrance of World War II.

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Comics realism and the Maus event : Comics and the dynamics of World War II remembrance

Alternative comics are typically defined by the supposed absence of superheroes and other mainstream genres, yet these genres have appeared repeatedly in key examples of alternative comics, including works by Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Art Spiegelman, and Jaime Hernandez. These cartoonists’ use of mainstream genres takes the form of what I call ‘genre-splicing,’ the combination of two or more genres in a way that fragments the fictional reality of the work or violates the norms of the genres employed. Genre-splicing provides a vehicle for many effects and aims, including thematic development, narrative pleasure, self-reflexivity, and disjunctive disruption. Alternative cartoonists’ use of genre-splicing not only punctures the myth that alternative comics are defined by mainstream genres’ absence, it also challenges the description of alternative comics as adult, literary, and artistic, in contrast to the juvenile and commercial nature of most mainstream comics. Despite their contradictions,...

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An alternative by any other name: genre-splicing and mainstream genres in alternative comics

A developed tradition of illustrating Siberian texts in Russian literature makes it possible to identify several approaches and corresponding principles for interpreting texts through illustrations. The approach examined in this article can be for convenience called an “icon-like” as it focuses on the Orthodox tradition in visual arts and is related to corresponding iconographic patterns in illustration. One of the key representatives of this approach is an Irkutsk artist Sergey Eloyan, who turned to the art of book illustration in 2003 within a large-scale project by Gennady Sapronov aimed at publishing the most outstanding works by Siberian writers. An edition of The Tsar Fish by Viktor Astafyev ranks significantly in this series. As the book is very complex in terms of genre, the “icon-like” approach became a means for the artist to visualise the liminal chronotope and paradoxical nature of Astafyev’s images when illustrating the piece. Moreover, Eloyan challenged a certain tradition for illustrating Astafyev’s books which complicated the artist’s task. Established in the Soviet period when Astafyev’s works were subjected to severe censorship, that tradition of illustrating did not allow to reveal the fundamental for the author inseparability of the beautiful and unbearable, the substance of life and the substance of death through a set of pictorial imagery. When freed from the shackles of censorship in the post-Soviet period, The Tsar Fish turned out to be saturated with completely polar imagery: the beautiful and disgusting, the high and low do not simply coexist, but merge into something inseparable. It would appear very difficult to even imagine an integral concept of illustration that could translate such a wide range of emotions into static imagery. Since the beginning of the 2000s, however, two attempts have been made to create a systematic pictorial set of images for The Tsar Fish. The first of these are Eloyan’s illustrations, and the second those of Oleg Mikhailov in 2013. Both of these are conceptual interpretations of the task of visualising an artistic text at the junction of traditional and new approaches of book illustration, made from different perspectives.

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The “icon-like” approach to visualisation of opposing imagery in a siberian text in illustrations by sergey eloyan for viktor astafyev’s the tsar fish

hen art spiegelman's Maus ?: A Survivor's Tale (1991)— the second volume of his Pulitzer prize-winning account, in comic-book format, of his family's persecution during the Holocaust1— made it on to the New York Times' best-seller list, the editors initially placed the work on the fiction side of the ledger.2 They believed, apparently, that a work written in comic-strip style, with humans depicted as animals, could not legitimately be labeled as a true story. Only after Spiegelman himself sent a letter to the Times, protesting his book's placement, were the editors persuaded to switch Maus to the nonfiction side of the list. Spiegelman wrote, in part, \"If your list were divided into literature and nonliterature, I could gracefully accept the compliment as intended, but to the extent that 'fiction' indicates that a work isn't factual, I feel a bit queasy\" (\"A Problem of Taxonomy\" 2). In a terse editor's reply, the Times noted that the Library of Congress had categorized the book as nonfiction, and, \"Accordingly, this week we have moved Maus ÍÍ to the hard-cover nonfiction list, where it is No. 13\" (\"A Problem of Taxonomy\" 2). The debate over the status of Spiegelman's work should not be seen as simply an example of the obtuseness of the Times' editorial-board

Joshua L. Charlson

Papers

Framing the Past: Postmodernism and the Making of Reflective Memory in Art Spiegelman's Maus