Mar. 30; Shakes; A Midsmrs Night's Drm

Well-crafted and beautifully done, I thought the Shakespeare Manga was much good fun. As wonderful as the graphic representation was (and it was quite good indeed) I oft find myself absorbed by the brilliant language of William Shakespeare. Every line has a purpose in his work. There is always some deeper meaning beyond the text.

The Manga was a pleasurable version because the graphics complimented the text and created an added understanding, rather than being too drawn out and distracting. A good example of great cohesion between the panels and text takes place over the span of pages 30-34. Hermia and Lysander are making their plan to run and hide out in the woods so that they may preserve their love. A picture technique often used in this version, illustrator Kate Brown places a characters head, in this case that of Lysander, in the bottom corner of a section of frames. The other three or four panels beam out and expand through to fill the rest of the quadrant. This has a way of centering that character (Lysander) emotionally in the scene.

As it takes place in the focus on page 32, this clever depiction shows Lysander's look of anxiety as it associate to his loving embrace of Hermia, his regrets for the integral failures of men, and his promise of everlasting love for Hermia.

At the bottom of the page Lysander is at the edge of kissing Hermia. It's understood that it is a faithful moment of deep truth for the love of these two youth.

Mar 16: The Saga Continue: Maus II

The reoccurring question that comes up in Art Speigelman's Maus II is, "Why all the detail about his interactions with his father?" He could just as easily have written exclusively about the horrors and harrowing escapes made by his father at the Holocaust, and he would have still created a truly great account of the tragedy. But by the time starts us on Maus II, the vivid stories of the Holocaust begin to appear secondary to his on-going struggle to carry-on a functional, healthy relationship with his father.

Spiegelman begins to expel so much time on his relationship with his father that the reader begins to wonder what is going on here with our author. In the early goings of the second Maus volume, he takes us to one of his actual therapy sessions. Ironically, things come full circle and by the end of the book, the written and drawn pages begin to resemble a session of therapy.

Maus I: Beg, Borrow, & Deal

The most powerful theme that I detected in Maus I was Vladek and his family's way of negotiating bribes and business arrangements as their most effective means of survival, and the gradual eroding of their power to do so. In that sense, Maus I is a humbling story of one family's fall from high prestige to the death chambers of the Nazi Holocaust.

The most haunting line in all the story occurs at the very end of page 115. It's Vladek's recounting of the last time that he saw his father in-law. As the two are separated, father in-law's fate left in no doubt, Vladek recalls that, "He was a millionairre, but even this didn't save him his life."

Lines like this carry tremendous power becuase they contibute to the sense of tragic inevitibility throughout the story. Vladek and the others slowly, one-by-one, begin to sense the reality that regardless of their high place in society, their lives are coming under attack from the German regime.

The members of Vladek's family have several ways of dealing wth this realization. Some use denial, some use the wait-and-see method. Some are proactive and try to compromise, others are defensive and try maintain their lifestyle.