In contrast to writers we've read in class, such as Marjane Satrapi or Gene Yang, who favor a more cartoonish style, Cruse chooses to depict the story of his characters in realistic terms? How does that affect the story to come? Do you remember Scott McCloud's scale of realism and how he suggests it influences audience identification with the characters? Does this scale help to make sense of Cruse's choices in Stuck Rubber Baby? Do you feel sympathy for the characters in the text?
As the book nears its end, there is more and more violence framing the narrative. How does Cruse's depiction of violence differ from that of Spiegelman or Satrapi?
Although Cruse's graphic novel was written a bit ago, it has been very influential on subsequent writers. How/ do you see traces of this influence on some of the work we've read in class?
In the beginning of the semester, we discussed how graphic narratives/ comics are themselves a medium. Do you think that the medium of comics is particularly useful for telling stories about difference, whether in terms of race, gender, or sexuality? Would you have had the same response to the story of closeted sexuality and racial violence if it were in a conventional novel? In what way does Cruse use images to make us feel sympathetic to the characters struggling with identity and equality in the text?
How does Cruse experiment with the size, shape, and placement of panels to tell the story of Stuck Rubber Baby?
As I stated in a previous post, I feel the realism portrayed in Stuck Rubber Baby keeps me at arms length from the characters, but does not keep me outside of the story. Shortcomings on the other hand alienated me from the characters, and I felt no connection to his characters whatsoever, even though both books have a similar style as far as their realism is portrays. Cruse is able to use realism and still have his readers connect with his story, perhaps because of his open frames, direct dialog with his audience and when he chooses to draw off the page allowing the story to flow into my world.
ReplyDeleteThe violence depicted is much more in your face as opposed to Persepolis and Maus, while you see it because of the separation from realism there is less horrific impact...not really the right word. I feel that Maus and Persepolis wanted us to focus more on the historical significance of the violence rather than the violence itself, where Cruse wants us to focus on the here and now this happened right in front of me...we is aiming at the shock value. Specifically when the hanging takes place...there is a shattering not only of world but also of spirit.
Lastly, there is a direct correlation to the movement of time in Cruse book toward the end...when he wants to move things along there are many panels per page and when he wants to draw things out he uses larger images which take more time to focus and examine.
I think it's a really good point to say that Cruse uses realism, but still gets the reader connect with the story. I definitely felt that way as I was reading Stuck Rubber Baby. While I so far have found myself agreeing with the idea that a more abstracted face encourages me to participate and see myself in the character (like McCloud says), I definitely felt sympathy for the characters in Stuck Rubber Baby.
DeleteI think you're reasoning of how this book keeps you at arm's length from the characters is one of the reasons I enjoyed this book so much! It makes sense why I didn't like Shortcomings as much since they DID alienate us from the characters. I guess this is a valid point as to what makes a comic or any story, for that matter, successful. We want to connect the characters!! So good point!
DeleteI think that Cruse did a really good job of making connections between gay rights and civil rights. He showed how Toland had close friends in both worlds and how he was able to experience second-hand some of the cruelty shown toward both gay people and black people. Toland was in the closet during most of the story, so he didn’t have the full experience of being an gay man who was out of the closet. He even expressed that when Sammy was murdered, it could have been him (Toland) and that the only difference was that people knew for certain that Sammy was gay. Through Toland’s point of view, the audience can see when the gay and black communities have similarities in the treatment they receive and there are times when these two overlap (such as at Alleysax or with Les who is both gay and African-American). There are also times when we still see black people who are homophobic and gay people who are racist.
ReplyDeleteMcCloud’s scale of realism in Understanding Comics shows that when a face is less cartoony, people are less likely to identify with that character. I would say that Cruse’s illustrations are highly realistic when compared with the comics we’ve read previously. According to McCloud, this should make the reader less likely to identify with the characters. I think this was mainly the case as I was reading. I sympathized with Toland, but I didn’t necessarily picture myself in his shoes. And I think this had more to do with the realistic style than the actual content of the story, because I identified with Marjane Satrapi without ever having gone through anything like she has.
I feel like the violence depicted in Cruse’s drawings was more realistic and gritty. It was definitely shocking and I think he was trying to communicate, as best he could, how horrible the violence was. The style of Persepolis on the other hand was more cartoony and Maus was more detailed, but showed animals instead of humans. All three definitely had an impact, but I think Cruse’s drawings were probably the most realistic.
Stuck Rubber Baby
ReplyDeleteStuck Rubber Baby puts together the issues with gay rights and civil rights by placing them all in the same setting. There are get-togethers for gay and black people where they can enjoy themselves without the fear of being judged. Cruse places these issues close together because they are both simple human rights that are similar in many ways.
The choice to use realistic depictions of people and locations instead of a more cartoonish style makes the story seem much more serious. It follows along with real life instead of swerving out into the surreal. Persepolis seemed to diverge from the story path to venture into Marjane’s state of mind and how she saw the world while Toland’s situations were taken much more realistically. There were a few instances where the character would present things he imagined in his head (the image of his head blown open), but for the most part, his story is set in the real world. It being more realistic in nature, I took the story more seriously and somewhat expected less playfulness and more of the opposite. Cruse gave each character very dominant characteristics. He detailed each form making them hard to mix up with other characters. They have more than dominant traits. There are details in skin and form that greatly separates them from each other. In Persepolis, I felt like I had a hard time telling characters apart in some scenes because of their simple forms. Marjane’s mole was the characteristic that, for the most part, set her apart from everyone. They were drawn so similarly and so simply. I feel like the character designs made the reader more sympathetic for these characters because we are getting a more direct look into their lives and personalities based on design. If they were simple, I would have a hard time seeing them as real people in these real situations.
We see a lot more violence later on in the story. Satrapi’s choice in violence was far less graphic. Most of the time the violence was cut and made the reader have to imagine the specific scenes where a character would be killed or hurt. Maus and Cruse depict violence very similarly. They are very direct in their presentations and this graphic violence is important to the story. It makes the situation of racism more physical and real. I felt for the characters and what they had gone through and wouldn’t feel the same way if these situations of violence were just thrown into the background.
The use of comics in presenting race, gender, and sexuality is the perfect medium. It makes these situations very direct and forces the reader to see what is actually going on. These situations are presented in a way that the reader is forced to accept what they are seeing. The use of graphic violence and sexuality frames the character as a distinct person. You wouldn’t see the character in the same way if it were simply a written novel. Toland’s interaction with racism and sexuality would have been harder to imagine in a novel than to see for ourselves in these comic images. I might not feel as much for Toland if we were simply given descriptions of his life. I needed that look of fear and intrigue Toland had when he first explored his sexuality with Les. It set up feelings that I needed to see for myself.
Cruse seems to focus his panels. He squishes them all together for a continuous stream of information and facial expressions in certain scenes. Cruse chooses not to focus these situations and just lets them flow slowly. Persepolis seemed to be more focused while Stuck Rubber Baby was a longer read because of the vast amounts of panels and strenuous dialogue used to set up these intense situations of character growth for Toland.
I think that words and pictures combine well in comics in general to present a fuller picture to the reader. And I agree with you about the facial expressions of the characters in Stuck Rubber Baby efficiently communicating a lot of information about the characters' moods and thoughts that would have been difficult to convey so directly in a novel.
DeleteI talked a lot about realism in the comic in my midterm, so I won't cheat by reiterating those points here!
ReplyDeleteBut I do want to talk about depictions of violence in the graphic novel. Fiction writing is sticky business, and the use of the graphic novel—particularly in cases like we’ve seen where we have a first person narration (or at least a focalized frame orientation). For one thing with realism, we perceive the message almost instantaneously (It’s in McCloud, 49), so with little to no mediation with expressionistic nuances in the art, the reader will experience the same sort of raw shock of the image without having to process it in that moment. It can show the reader things that the character does not see in the moment, and even things that the character does not know or understand.
Prose uses a vocabulary that is at once very loaded. Any sort of allusion has loaded meaning. In prose, for instance, one could convey a level of emotional detachment if a character relates the sight motorcycle fatality victim as clods of earth and mud on the highway, or a level of situational detachment when they describe it in parts like a forensics investigator. Perhaps there’s such chaos in the processing of the image in the character that they relate to it as a mass quickly, yet this doesn’t in this spot of the narrative convey the sort of psychological branding of trauma that has taken place in the onlooker. Not to say that it can’t be done—it can, and is artfully. It’s just tricky with a first person.
There’s a few dangers with visual representation that don’t necessarily occur in prose, though prose does have it’s own set of constraints to navigate. Sensationalism could be a real danger—exploiting the imagined bodies of real victims for a sort of cheep, quick thrill. If the bodies of the victims are cartoons it can in some people’s eyes trivialize the event. McCloud tells us, though, that this could assist in reader identification, meaning that we could perhaps see a cartoon corpse as not belonging to, say, a specific member of the choir locked in time and place, but ANY child who is a victim of racial violence as a concept.
Partial frames allow the same sort of effect because of closure.
The frames can also pack very dense information (chaos, masses, things being fired, overlapping conversations) but still keep the pace very quick—again, useful with the first person who has awareness of these surroundings but not enough active attention to relay thematically loaded images back to the reader in extended time.
And still, with comics, there are expressionistic roots to be taken to convey perceptual meaning for a character by changes in style, lighting, frames and so on.
The art style of Stuck Rubber Baby was very unique, and quite impressive with the amount of detail that Cruse fits in his drawings. The rest of the works we have read (except for Shortcomings) rely heavily on the use of abstraction to facilitate audience identification with the characters. McCloud makes the point in his book that the more abstracted a character is, the more likely we are to see ourselves in it, the less likely we are to get distracted by the messenger. This method is very helpful in Maus and Persepolis, where the characters are very unfamiliar to Western audiences and therefore benefit from this abstraction effect. In Stuck Rubber Baby however, the story is so driven by the messengers that abstraction is not necessary. The characters lifelike appearance only helps to make the very complex characters feel more real and alive. Perhaps for this reason, when I found out that the book was fictional and not based on real people or events, I was actually a little disappointed. Cruse is extremely successful in creating characters that feel real.
ReplyDeleteStuck Rubber Baby was very dense, it was almost more like reading a traditional novel than some other books we have read in class. There are so many panels on each page, and the detail and text are so small, that sometimes it was difficult to follow. There are also many moments where Cruse experiments with panel placements and creates pages that are wholly unique and linked to the narrative. When things start to go crazy, like for example when Toland is describing Sammy's lynching from Sammy's POV, the frames get jagged and vary in shape and size, as well as clatter around the page like pieces of broken glass. This technique is very effective when viewed in contrast with some pages where Cruse sets up a very rigid grid system. The chaos of the story is mirrored and highlighted by the chaos in the composition.
By using a visual medium like a graphic novel, it lets the author control what they want the readers to feel and see. There is more empathic control with images then with just words. That makes the use of these comics a great platform for difficult topics like race, sexuality and religion. You can show facial expressions on the character’s faces. It allows for less confusion. Just like we can misread text to our friends, we can misread text in a novel. So images assist that error gap in translating the story.
ReplyDeleteI feel out of all the books we have read, Cruse uses the wides collections of frame layouts. On the crazy and hysterical moments, the layouts imitate how jumbled the mind was in that moment. It was a great way to illustrate that crazy confusion of times where Toland was have lost of personal turmoil and confusion or when Sammy’s murdered happened. There were large images that were used as the background images and had thought bubbles in nonlinear patterns but were still connected. It was easy to follow the nonlinear lines because they were linked by little bubble lines.
Overall, this was a great read. I enjoyed this book as much as I enjoyed Maus. So these have been my top two books so far!
I think the realistic style of Stuck Rubber Baby helped me take it more seriously than the other pieces we've read. I forgot that I was even reading a comic at portions. It was like reading a novel, but I was still aware --and in awe-- of the art. I don't think it was as crucial for the audience to identify with the characters in this as it was in the earlier pieces we've read. Important to sympathize, yeah, but this story is entirely centered around knowing the voice of the MC and his friends. Not much happens for most of the story. There are a few scenes of intense, affecting action, but most of the actual "what happens" is just people sitting around talking. Having interesting -- and this is the most important part, I think -- and easily identifiable characters is very important to a story with such a large cast and so little action.
ReplyDeleteOverall, I think the art is awesome and I think it works very well for the kind of story this is.
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I think this story is so text heavy that it was closer to reading a novella to me than a graphic novel. I don't think that's a bad thing, even looking at it from a comics pov. It offers the best of both worlds, for me. There's beautiful language and story-telling, but it also has the instantly impactful images -- like Sammy after he was lynched -- that are difficult, but not impossible, for prose writers to obtain.
For the LIFE of me I cannot figure out how to actually post my questions on this site. But if you wanna take a look, I started a blog so I could post them up.http://famousinthatanonymousway.blogspot.com/2015/03/stuck-rubber-baby-questions-part-1-and-2.html
ReplyDeleteCruse definitely parallels gay rights and civil rights in SRB and I think one of the most interesting ways is what happens to Sammy. He was basically killed by a lynch mob, which is an infamous situation that arose in the civil rights movement but I have never heard too much about homosexuals being lynched. Cruse pairs the black and gay communities together in this story in a way that I also have never heard of being the case. It could be that this world is just a microcosm for the points Cruse was trying to make about the parallels, but I think there has always been more tension between the gay rights and civil rights movements than depicted in SRB.
ReplyDeleteThe realistic art style made me feel more like I was watching a movie than reading a comic. American Born Chinese and Persepolis give me the most comic-like experience because they are so loose and cartoony and the effect of reliability described by McCloud is better achieved. I don't know how much thought comic artists put into reliability, but although I hated the things happening to these characters they didn't feel relatable to me.
I think the graphic medium really allows us to look at race and gender much more concretely than the novel form. I think similar responses to the story are possible if it were a conventional novel, but the graphic form produces a more immediate effect. I pair this book with Maus because of the style and content and the images of Sammy hanging from the tree and those girls hanging in the trees in Maus both stand out to me more than they would if it had been written in only words.
Cruse experiments a great deal with off balance frames, or the frames that bleed off the page. When he does it it is usually to create a very disorienting and dramatic effect such as the scenes were Sammy yells at his father and when Toland has the vision of being Sammy when he was killed. The very jumbled scene of when Toland bumps into Sammy's legs, where the panels are all wild shapes and scattered recklessly about the page, is followed by pages of panels that are almost all the exact same shape and size. The contrast really serves to diversify the pace.
Sorry for the extremely late reply. I had a busy weekend and did not see this get posted. The realism of Stuck Rubber Baby is similar to that of Shortcomings but Cruse's characters are far more approachable. The realism of this text serves to pull the reader out of the story, and allows for Cruse to guide the reader through the themes of the story. One of the problems I had with SRB was that the novel felt too chaotic. The style of Maus flowed more naturally than SRB. Graphic Novels serve as an invaluable narrative style. The rendition of scenes, like the hanging of Sammy, the scene where the KKK members harass and lynch the man in front of his son, has a greater impact than just simply reading about them.
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ReplyDeleteI think Cruse makes it more clear, that not only were people struggling for their rights as human beings, but as humans beings with different sexual orientations, that not only were African-Americans fighting to be treated fairly and equally as white Americans, but they were also entitled to love and marry whoever they wanted, regardless of what was seen or known as the traditional marriage.
The more realistic the comic is portrayed as, the more sympathy you feel because it’s a tactic authors use for the reader to identify with the characters in the story. Yes, you do feel some form of sympathy for the characters because it is seen on such a real scale, that people really did and still do endure this kind of mistreatment and prejudice.
I think Cruse’s experimentation with the size, shape and placement of panels in the story makes it a bit more complex than the books we’ve read so far, considering they were of a simpler form, with bigger panels and more graphics than the actual text.
1. It’s interesting to note just how readily Cruse blurs the lines between LGBT rights and African American rights. Any fringe locations within the story, whether it’s the Rhombus or Alleysax or the Melody Motel, seem to emanate a uniform sense of acceptance to its patrons. Equally disenfranchised, these groups come together to relax and relate to one another. Cruse acknowledges the distance that exists between members of the different movements, throwing in the comment by the Rhombus patron by how many “niggers” there were that night. But I think that within his book, Cruse tries to voice a desire to rally together, despite the differences that may exist within these groups. United against a hostile majority, I agree with Cruse that marginalized groups do better by working together.
ReplyDelete2. In all honesty, I’m not quite sure why Cruse chose this art style while making Stuck Rubber baby. Even with McCloud’s spectrum of realism and abstraction in mind, it’s difficult to find much of a reason for Cruse’s visual choice. With the dense arrangement of visuals, thick crosshatching textures, and Crumbian emphases on facial structures, Cruse places a large importance on what can only be called a grotesque realism. Even after reading through the entire book I never myself go beyond a distant, grudging acceptance of his visual style, and it felt like more of a distraction than any complement to the action or dialogue. I did find myself sympathizing with and relating to the characters in Stuck Rubber Baby, but I did not feel the same attachment to the characters that I had with Spiegelman’s more iconographic style. My only thought on why Cruse chose this style is that he wanted to opt out of having visually appealing characters, instead focusing on a greater sense of historical realism.
3. Spiegelman and Satrapi handle violence in a more implicit manner than Cruse in Stuck Rubber Baby, hinting at it but never going into too much detail. I find this has a certain power to it, where an audience’s imagination does the work when visualizing the violence itself. I think this creates a larger impact, when handled within a more abstract or cartoonish environment. That said, Cruse handles these more graphic scenes with great restraint and timing. Because of his choice of visuals, clear and unambiguous illustrations of violence are devastatingly effective, as seen in the verbal and visual descriptions afforded to Sammy’s lynching.