Maus and The Fun Home

I just read the two stories “Maus” and “The Fun Home”. Both stories are written as comics, sequential drawings that have word bubbles to express the characters voices to tell the stories. The first story was about a father and son having a conversation about the flashbacks the father had about his time as a prisoner of war. This story had a lot of Jewish slang in it that made the tone of the story stand out. You could tell the father had broken English, some of his sentences did not make sense and he often snuck in random Jewish words. Also, all of the characters names in this story were Jewish; for example Vladek, Mala, Anja. The characters reference the Jewish tradition Bar Mitzfah’s (blocks on pg 61) and the Jewish event Parsha’s Truma (blocks on pg 59). These depth of the culture in this story works well with the images because it helps to set the mood and get you into the time period from when the father was flashing back too. Ultimately, the tone in this story is that of an older man telling a story with an accent as well as broken language giving the listener a different sense of the story. For example, when an old Spanish woman is telling you a story you get the thick culture tone behind her voice and the story seems to have a different mood too it.

Next the second story “The Fun Home” was about just the opposite, a not fun home. The story is told by a girl, Allison, who is mainly writing about her and her father’s relationship. She begins by explaining a time when she was doing airplane with him and in the story you quickly realize the type of relationship they have and what kind of father he is. You can see how uninterested he is to be playing with his daughter. Quickly, he tells her to go get a vacuum to vacuum the rug, and to get a tool for him to fix something. This immediately sets the mood for the story to an emotionless and uncomfortable plot. Soon, we learn that her father is not so much a family man but a perfectionist that wants to make his life seem as perfect as possible, perfect house, perfect family. Throughout the story we learn that Allison’s father beats his children, as well as has sex with her brothers and in the end, kills himself. But during the story he still goes to church, is a school teacher, and keeps his house in good shape, trying to appear as “perfect” as possible. I believe the pictures worked well with this story as well as the first one. The images of the Dad show how mean and unconnected he his. He never seems to make eye contact with the other characters, always has a mean face on, etc. A block that stuck out to me was on page 17 where the family is taking a picture to show how perfect they are yet no one is smiling or interacting with one another showing no emotions. This was interesting to me.

This story is different than the first story “Maus” due to the way it is written. It does not have a lot of dialogue, mainly it is written as a story and the text is above each picture, where in “Maus” the story is told through the characters dialogue with few narration texts. These stories definitely were different due to the way they were written. Although they were both well written and did a good job of setting the mood and describing settings and characters, having the picture with the word was also interesting as a reader. I don’t often read comic strip stories but I enjoyed these two stories.