Looking at Photographs:Memories Open for Interpretation

“Comics echo the way the brain works. People think in iconographic images, not in holograms, and people think in bursts of language, not in

paragraphs”- Art Spiegelman

• Born February 15, 1948• Studied art and philosophy at• Harpur College before becoming

part of the underground comix subculture of the 1960s and 1970s

• 1965-1987 created Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids

• 1980 founded RAW magazine with his wife Francoise Mouly

• Maus originally serialized in the pages of Raw

• 1992 won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus

• 2004 In the Shadows of No Towers• 2011 won the Grand Prix at the

Angoulême International Comics Festival

“ I employ these allusions to James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms” – Alison Bechdel

• Born September 10, 1960• 1981 graduates from Oberlin

College with a B.A.• 1983 creates Dykes to Watch Out

For a comic strip that ran for 25 years in a variety of alternative newspapers

• 2008 anthologized in book form entitled The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

• 2006 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic published

• 2012 Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama published

• 2014 awarded the MacArthur Fellows “Genius” Award

• 2015 FunHome debuts on Broadway

• Earns 12 Tony Nominations • Wins 5 Tony Awards

“Elements omitted from a work of art are as much a part of that work as those included” (McCloud 82)

Bold and Solid LinesVisual starkness

Dark bold lines

Emphases on characters in the foreground of the frame

Use of closure

A Happy Death

Truth can be open to interpretation through juxtaposition of two images

Recreation of Family Photographs

Family Photographs

Conveying an Intimate Moment Crosshatching

bold lines

large horizontal panel

One side of his face is darkened by shadow another by light

The duality of her father’s personality

Bold Dark lines Stark Black and White

Photos create emotional connections

Juxtaposition Using real photographs to make a truth claim about survival

Human connections to the past and the present

A symbol of hope

Works Cited

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: First Mariner Books, 2006

Chute, Hillary L. “Materializing Memory”. Graphic Women Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010) : 95-134.

Dean-Ruzicka, Rachel. “Mourning and Melancholia in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic”. 2013. 2 May

2015

Elmwood, Victoria A. “Happy, Happy, Ever After: The Transformation of Trauma between the Generations in Art

Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale”. Biography (2004) :691-720.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory”. Gender and the Politics of Subjectivity

(1992-1993): 3-29

Lemberg, Jennifer. “Closing the Gap in Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home”. Women’s Studies Quarterly (2008): 129-140.

Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. New York: Pantheon, 1973