Author: Henry

This is my attempt at mapping Spinning. The model above presents the operationalization of “hope”, a recurring theme in the graphic novel which is symbolized by the presence of the color yellow in a panel; here, I present the percentage of panels containing yellow per chapter. A polynomial trend-line indicates a decrease in hope from the introduction, and and a radical increase towards the end of the book.

Conducting this numerical analysis reveals that the presence of hope is very high during the introduction –which possesses a joyful tone, almost as if hinting a feel-good novel–, which decreases exponentially throughout the entirety of the book until Chapter 8, where hope settles into the story and Tillie realizes what makes her happy, having its final peak in Chapter 10. In that final span of increasing hopefulness, Tillie quits skating, giving that it made her unhappy, and accepts her homosexuality, recognizing her sexuality does not mean the end of the world. When she learns to accept herself as she is, the numbers and my intuition as well indicate hope exponentially increases.

This helped me understand that Spinning is not necessarily a story centered around hope, but about a young girl trying to understand her sexuality, and ultimately her path towards self acceptance and making the most of life with what she has by dropping anything that pulled her down (ice skating), and living her life as she truly is.

What led me to explore hopefulness in this assignment was the seemingly spontaneous bursts of yellow throughout the entire novel. These led me to believe there had to be some sort of pattern hidden between the amount of yellow present. The model succeeded greatly in measuring the percentage of panels possessing yellow, but falls short when taking into account the amount of yellow per panel.  In multiple panels, very faint hints of yellow can be observed, while some are almost 75%+ yellow.

 

In conclusion, the operationalization of “hope” led me to understand that as Tillie learned to accept herself as she is and seek happiness in life, rather than submit to societal expectation, hopefulness in the book increases in an exponential fashion.

After analyzing the images in the site, I realized what makes them art is the fact that they capture casual moments in intimate friendships, and a glimpse of the crazy juvenile life I think it is a fun approach to the topic. However, in my honest and probably controversial opinion, I think that calling it art could be overrating its value; the fact the images are taken in very poor equipment on purpose somehow appears to give it some artistic value, but objectively analyzing this, I have come to perceive it is art just because it is the lens we are analyzing it through. In the bottom line, I really enjoyed the images, they remind me of great moments of my high school life!

This class we passed around our first draft comics and received feedback on them. To say the least, it was an incredibly helpful process, since the feedback was taken seriously and has given me a new sense of direction with my comic. I was very glad that the feedback reflected the tone I intended to depict: lighthearted and comic.Something I noticed was that a student took the idea of my comic to be that the reading competition was wha t pushed me to read, when in reality was something tat pushed me away from reading (probably should make that more clear in my comic). Another very interesting suggestion was that I should introduce more angles and types of frame into my comic to make it more interesting; I had nought really thought of varying angles that much because of my poor drawing abilities, but since so much emphasis was given in this domain, I’ll try my best to introduce some variance into my comic’s angle of depiction.

Humanity is complex… that’s an easy one. Just to be more concise, I’ll base this discussion off the fact that society is complex.

Spiegelman makes the argument throughout the whole novel, that when social constructs are removed from the reality we perceive, all humans are essentially identical. We will all possess the same needs and look out for our own well beings. Let me elaborate on this newfound term.

Our society is comprised of multiple social constructs, which are simply subjective realities societies create, accept, and conform to. Examples of this can be culture, religion, marriage, socioeconomic status, art, race, ethnicity, and many more. If you sit and think about it, you’ll realize that almost everything is socially constructed.

When you take the time to remove every social construct from the situations presented in Maus, you realize that in the end, whether it be a Pole, Jew, German, or American, they are all human, and under the objective lens, are all identical and homogeneous.

In page 64 of the first book, Vladek takes advantage of the persona-malleability presented by the social construct of nationality, and by pretending to be a Pole, manages to board a train that will get him far away from the work camp.

Yet a better example of the homogeneity of humanity is shown in page 29 of the second book, where Mandelbaum, one of the richest people in Sosnowiec, is shown to be one of the most misfortunate people at Auschwitz, having horribly mismatched shoes, overly large clothing, and no spoon to feed himself. Auschwitz, in a way, eliminates the social construct of socioeconomic status among the prisoner population; this is key to understanding Spiegelman’s idea, since now that the construct had been removed, all subjective value given by socioeconomic status has disappeared, and all prisoners are at the same level, whether in the past one was rich or poor.

 

Hence, in theory, if social constructs are ignored, one quickly realizes that all individuals form part of an essentially homogeneous population… what makes it heterogeneous most of the time are our social constructs of diversity. Social constructs, although key to society and vital to our survival, are malleable and distort the objective homogeneity of humanity.