GPA (German Propaganda Art)

Smoke--I guess most people associate smoke as bad and dangerous. That truly is what I believe Art Spiegelman wanted his readers to believe when her illustrated his graphic novel Maus. In all honesty I think that Spiegelman made smoke and the Nazis go hand in hand. In almost every panel, smoke is in a jagged line that is much too similar to the symbol of the Nazis--the Swastika.
  All this smoke represents the stress, the pollution, the deaths, the misfortunes that the Nazis present the world. We can thank the Nazis for coming up with a stupid idea to give the planet earth a thicker ozone layer.


 Next...
This panel on page 23 show an image of art smoking. The look of death roams his face just like those dead from the Holocaust. Just like hows the smoke comes out of chimneys bring the Jews back out into the world, smoke comes out of Art's cigarette bringing his soul out along with it. Smoke kills.








Lastly I would like to bring to light why Vladek might just have been "lucky" enough to survive the horrid Holocaust.

Vladek has been very good about not smoking his whole life. The smoke in this scenario symbolizes the smoke and ashes the come out of the chimney at the camps. Unlike all Vladek's family and friends who smoked, Vladek did not allow the stress of the Nazis to overcome his strong will. He did not smoke, nor did he allow the smoke to get to him. Vladek saved himself buy saving cigarettes; he didn't smoke out his soul, so neither did the chimneys smoke out his body.

KEEP STRAIGHT! DON'T MOVE!

Motion is carefully depicted in both volumes of Maus. The motion on the page literally represents the actions that were taken for each character during the Holocaust, but what not on the page--the choice of where to place stillness--represent the carefully planned out actions that would help a Jew survive through the Holocaust. One must work diligently when ordered to work, but MUST remain      Extremely Still           when organized in rows.

Art displays both motion and still on one page not only to show distress on behave of the victims but also to contracts the different perspective--the bully and the bullied. Focusing on page 108 of volume 1, motion and stillness contrast like black and white. Like foils, having the contrasting counterpart emphasis the power withheld in the other: still only still and movement that much more forceful.

The upper half of the page is very static and motionless because the mice are scared and worried. They remain still and silent as they watch their fellow Jews meet Death. As the reader climbs over the fence to the bottom half of the page they see things through the demon eyes of the Nazis. As the perspective changes abruptly, the movement starts. Through the eyes of the cats readers experience the excessive beating on the Jews. The panel on the left corner of the last row shows the force and the inhumane activities taken place all over Germany. Art shows his audience that everywhere, Jews were in fear of facing these monsters. All of them had only a fence to hide behind and it was only a matter of time before the Nazi came marching in.

The stillness and motion surface two distinct emotions. Art uses pathos to feel extreme worry and sorrow towards the still mice and extreme detest and anger towards the forceful monsters.

What Words Fail to DO.

Do words truly tell the whole story? Would it be easier to write your whole life down in words, or would it be easier just to use pictures?
Maybe people are just bad at describing. Is it just me, but when someone is explaining or describing another thing, I never seem to imagine it correctly. For every book I read, my characters are sure to look different when compared to people peoples imagination, and the characters I see are completely different from those in the movies. I have to say I didn't see the same Atticus Finch, but Gregory Peck did a beautiful job playing the role of Mr. Finch.
Sometime I feel like words don't properly illustrate an image. Let's try an experiment. (I tried with with google too-- very interesting.)
What do you see when I say a ring of different colors? My image looked a little something like this.

 

Maybe you saw something more tangible.

maybe you saw something a bit more abstract.

This is what google showed me:

Everything was different but they all fit the distribution of "a ring of different colors."
Not only do words fail to properly describe, words also leave out the detailed emotions that can be found in an image.

After all pictures are worth a thousand words.

But I do agree greatly with Scott McCloud; without the help of words, a picture will not reach it's greatest value. Pictures have great potential but they need a gentle push to create greatness. Does it ever occur to you that one could wrongly interpret an image? What if the little girl wasn't happy about the boys confession. What if the soldier is getting annoyed with his dog and he just wants some rest before combat. Without the help of a few words, a picture can not prove their worth. Let the era begin where pictures tell and words show.

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Perspective: what do you see?

 Are you ever frustrated that you are always required to write essays for classes? Do you ever complain about a teacher for giving you too much homework? I can't argue because I am one of those self-centered people who fail to think about other people. Although it may seem like a lot of work on behalf of the student, can you imagine what it's like for a teacher to grade every single paper that their one hundred some students wrote? David Foster Wallace knocked some sense into me as an audience when he claims that people live in a little box full of themselves and fail to see the world outside of the thin walls. Incorporating the perspectives of other people into his speech he effectively displays how an individual is blind when considering the life of a fellow human being. He starts by showing his audience day in his shoes and how he can't help but feel infuriated by the long checkout line and how "[he couldn't] take [his] fury out on the frantic lady working the register" (Wallace). His day is not sunny with a chance of meatball so he goes about hating "all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas" (Wallace).

But when he decides not to let his default-setting take the best of him, he shows his audience that "it's not impossible" to step out of the box and open your eyes to the world around you. It's just like when Atticus Finch says "you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (To Kill a Mockingbird). Everyone preaches this theory because we don't live in alone on this planet, therefore there is no reason to believe that we are the center. Wallace's belief that people are self-centered is not a theory I reject because I'm sure many people feel like they are the center of the universe.
Wallace even says that "[he is] the absolute center of the universe" (Wallace). I'm sure that there are still a hand full of people who actually think that Earth is the center of this vast space, but guess what? We are not. We aren't even the center of our own solar system. There are thousands of solar systems in our galaxy and infinitely many galaxies in the universe. Compared to most of the planets and stars out there, we don't even make up a speck of dust. It's all perspective. How do you see things? Will you take the time and effort of step into a new realm? Will you look beyond the clouds and into the stars? What do you see?