Every week after doing the other readings for this class I try to do the reading from the B.O.S. book and end up getting completely lost and board not even half way through the reading. I have not been able to finish one reading from this book so far.
    I thought that maybe the reading for this week "Jewish Memoir Goes Pow! Zap! Oy!" would be different because it's by the same author as Jobnik which we have read so maybe it would be easier to understand what she's writing about. I was very disappointed. Not only did I not understand what gonzo comics were until class but I haven't read "Portnoy's Complaint" which she talks about a lot or "Binky Brown" so I found it hard to follow along with her thoughts on these comic books. However, I did enjoy the part of the reading where she talks about her childhood and how she was first inspired by comic books. I just wish the rest of the book was more like this instead of people talking about other author's comics and how they feel about them with the majority of these comics being ones we haven't read in class.
    The B.O.S. book seems to be aimed more at individuals who have read and know about many different comics. Until I took this class I had not read a single comic book and knew nothing about them. If I did have more of a general understanding of these authors and the different comics mentioned I think this book would be a lot more helpful and a lot easier to get through.

Jobnik

    I have to say that Jobnik is probably the most confusing thing I have read this semester. The discussion we had in class Wednesday on the history of Israel cleared up some of the questions I had but there are still a few things I don't quite understand.
    Something I'm unsure about is what's happening in the second half of page 65 where she is standing outside looking around and then suddenly starts falling over and ends up laying on the ground. I wonder if she is so amazed and overwhelmed by all the stars and planes in the sky that she just falls over but this can't be right because her face doesn't show this kind of emotion. Also, the way she falls over it looks like she got hit by something because of the way her arms are stretched out in front of her when she falls. I also don't like how much the story skips around. I understand it's supposed to be a journal and if she's not writing everyday the events aren't going to flow together that well but even all the events that happen in a single day don't connect with each other. One minute she is laying on the ground looking up at the sky and the next she's being asked by some woman for her papers. It makes the story hard to follow.
    I especially found it difficult to understand what was going on in the first few pages of the story because of how the different frames overlap and some of the word bubbles start in one frame but the words are actually in another (page 11). I wasn't sure what I should be reading first.

    One thing that makes The Rabbi's Cat such a wonderful book is the cat. I just love his personality and how arrogant he is. He acts just like how an actual cat would act and some of the things he says are so funny and they are things that I think a cat would actually say if it could actually talk. I had a cat growing up and the cat in this book reminds me so much of him.
    One of my favorite parts of the book is towards the beginning when the cat says how the rabbi doesn't bother him when he does things and the pictures show him running around on the table knocking everything off and making a mess. Then there's a picture of the rabbi sitting at the table not really looking upset but just like he's excepted the fact that the cat is messing up his papers. I think this is probably because the cat does it all the time. I also like how curious the cat is about everything. He's always questioning the rabbi about things and wanting to learn more about Judaism. He even follows the rabbis students around to see where they go.
    I also like the way the cat is drawn even though it's not very realistic. He's so cute with his big ears and bright green eyes. Probably my favorite picture is the one on the title page for the chapter called The Bar Mitzvah. He's peaking out from between some books looking like his up to something that's not going to make the rabbi too happy.

The Rabbi's Cat

    I know from class Wednesday that a lot of people didn't really like The Rabbi's Cat that much especially not the art style. As for me I really liked the book and the art style and I think it's my favorite thing that we've read so far.
     One thing I like about the art style is that the characters all look so different from each other. The one thing I found confusing about Maus was that all the characters looked so much alike and I found it difficult sometimes to keep track of what was happening to which characters and who was saying what. I also like the amount of detail that he includes in so many of the pictures. There are some drawings that are very flat looking and not as developed as the others but I like these as well. It seems like in these drawings he is more interested in showing the facial expressions of the characters because this is more important that what's going on around the figure. It also gives your eyes a chance to rest since there  is so much going on in the other pictures.
      I also really enjoy the colour that is used in the art work and I don't think it would be the same book if it wasn't in colour. There are so many scenes that give you a certain feeling or emotion because of the colours that are used. For example, I think part of what makes the cat's dream so effective is the fact that a lot of light blues and other muted colours were used. It gives the reader a kind of dreamy feel when they see these colours especially compared to the bright warm colours that are used in the majority of the book.

    Something I found partly comical and partly kind of sad is the part in Maus where Vladek goes to the store to return half eaten food. First he tries giving the food away to Artie and Francoise. When they refuse and since he can't eat it he decides to return it because he can't bare to throw anything away especially not food.
     It's funny because I can imagine the look on the workers faces when he asked to return the half eaten food. Also, I can see why Artie and Francoise were too embarrassed to go into the store with him especially since the only reason the store worker finally took back the groceries was because he felt bad for Vladek because he's old, sick, and was mistreated in Auschwitz.
     The reason I feel bad for Vladek is because surviving the war and the concentration camp made him this way. He could have been a bit stingy to begin with but it's the war that actually made him like this. It's easy to see how this can happen. He spent so many years saving every little bit of food he could find, and not just food, every little thing he owned because he had so little. One tiny piece of bread could have prevented him from starving for another day. His old shoes filled with holes kept his feet from getting frostbite. The fact that he saved everything kept him alive and now that the war is over he's finding it hard to change.

   While reading Maus II I really enjoyed the part where Vladek meets the Frenchman. Even though it wasn't that big of an event in Vladek's telling of what happened in Auschwitz, I found it very touching.
     As seen with some of the other events that happened, when people are starving and living in such horrible conditions, they are less likely to share things especially food. Not only did the Frenchman give Vladek food to eat he had so much that he was able to trade the extra in order to get other things he needed. Vladek's encounter with the Frenchman reminds me a lot of his statement to Artie in the beginning of the first half of Maus. He said something about being locked in a room with no food with your so called friends and see if they are still truly your friends. This being said I think the Frenchman was one of the few true friends Vladek had  in the concentration camp.
     The Frenchman was not only a help to Vladek, and was probably one of the reasons he survived, but Vladek was also a huge help to him. Before Vladek came along he had no one to talk to because no one else spoke French or English. I couldn't imagine being stuck in a place like that with no one I could talk to about the things that were happening. Not only that but to not understand what any of the Nazi guards were saying would have been even mare terrifying. At least Vladek understood German and Polish and was able to communicate with them. I think Vladek also saved the Frenchman's life and kept him from going crazy.

    I enjoy Spiegelman's choice to draw animals instead of humans. As I said before in my last blog, it makes sense to draw the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats since cats chase and usually kill mice. I really didn't see the fact that the Poles were portrayed as mice a negative thing. It might be because I really like pigs and I don't think of them as a bad animal but I thought that Spiegelman just needed some sort of neutral animal and just happened to chose a pig. What I mean by a neutral animal is the fact that pigs don't usually go after mice but if they are really hungry they will eat just about anything even mice. This kind of describes the Poles because of how some of them were good and tried to help the Jews but others sided with the Nazis.
    I really think his drawings of the animals are great because they show so much emotion. The Nazi cats and some of the pigs looks so evil because of the way their mouths are drawn with their teeth showing. Even though all of the mice look pretty much the same you can tell if they're feeling sick or scared because of the way the eyes are drawn. You can see so much of what they're feeling just by looking at their faces. This would be a challenging thing to do especially when you are drawing mice but I think Spiegelman did a great job at it.

    I've just finished reading the first half of Maus and I really enjoy it so far. It's so different from all the other books I've read about the Holocaust. A lot of the events that have happened in Maus are things that I have read before like the Jews having their businesses taken away from them and the various things that happened inside the ghettos. However Maus gives a new twist on all of these things. The reader is seeing these events through the eyes of a Holocaust survivor. The fact that Artie is interviewing his dad and that the story switches back and forth between past and present shows a kind of connection between this event that happened in the past with where we are today. This is something I haven't seen in any other book about the Holocaust.
    I really enjoy Spiegleman's style of writing. It seems like he wrote down exactly how his father told the story because the things his father says aren't always grammatically correct and sometimes the word order is wrong. It shows that English wasn't his father's native language and it makes it feel like you are actually at this interview.
    I find it interesting that he chose to draw animals instead of people. Even though he used animals I don't think it takes away from story or that it makes it seem less real or less serious of a historical event. It makes sense that he used mice to represent the Jews since mice are commonly chased out of houses because people don't want them there just like in history the Jews have been chased out of different areas because people didn't want them there.

    Thinking back to class on Wednesday and about our discussion of Magneto, I have to say that I agree with the person who stated that Magneto seems to be going against everything he believes in. In the article on the X-Men that we read for class it states that Magneto is obsessed with replacing humans with a mutant race like himself. This seems a lot like what the Nazis were trying to do only instead of a mutant race it's an aryan race. Magneto wants to stop discrimination from happening but yet he is actually creating more discrimination. It says in the article that he is afraid of humans but yet he makes a statement in one of the comics that he doesn't want to live to see another people destroy what they don't understand and fear and here Magneto is destroying the human race because he is afraid of them.
    Even though Magneto feels like he doesn't fit in and that he's an outcast he seems to be acting more like a Nazi. In my opinion Dr. X seems to be a more Jewish figure in this story even though he wasn't actually in the concentration camp. He just want a world where everyone can live together in peace. He isn't discriminating against anyone and he is trying to teach the mutants how to use their powers to do good things and help people instead of hurt them. Dr. X seems to be the more Jewish figure simply because he isn't trying to change the people who are different.