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Judenhass: is a bit of a conundrum. Not in reading - there's nothing to puzzle out - but in conception. Why this? How does it meet Dave's criteria of being a comic that demonstrates what it's possible to create within the medium of comics when it's barely a comic? In terms of either form or content, who is this going to be news for?
It's an achievement in itself, I guess, to include so many images of the Holocaust and achieve so little in terms of emotional charge. The spread of the gates of a lager has an impact. Nothing else really did. Sim doesn't succeed in making a story out of Judenhass, though the idea of doing so is valid, IMHO. The fact that anti-Semitism and the camps are just links on the same chain isn't stressed enough in the popular idea of the Holocaust; it's too often treated as a uniquely Nazi evil rather than a genocide which waited at the end of a long, but predictable, road. But a collection of anti-Semitic quotes juxtaposed with photorealistic - and often hard to decipher - images from the Holocaust is a first-year film student's idea of bringing anti-Semitism and its historical virulence and persistence to life. It doesn't work; it's bloodless, passionless, frictionless. Complaints that Sim does nothing new with the medium might seem disrespectful to the subject. This was an opportunity, though, to use his mastery of the form to some effect, and it was an opportunity missed. In trying to craft something that would appeal to non-comics readers, he's dumbed down what made his work important. The actual comics vocabulary a non-comics reader would have, and which could have been extended here, has been ignored. It's an unspectacular failure.
None of Sim's politics or misogyny in here, though. The coda about the foundation of Israel is all you see of it, and it's not a stretch to see that as nothing more than an attempt at a happy ending.
Glamourpuss: is more and less. It's more readable, it's more fun, it's got some very nice art and it's interesting. On the other hand it's much smaller than anything Sim's done before. Obviously it's smaller than a depiction of the Holocaust in ambition and scope, but it's also smaller in terms of potential audience than even the Byzantine endgame of Cerebus. That was, at its best, a comic for people who wanted to see what could be done with the medium. This is a comic for people who are specifically interested in what Dave Sim wants to do with the medium. Which, as it turns out, is draw pretty girls and expound on the development and history of realism in comics.
Two issues in, it's entertaining at times and sort of dryly interesting at others. It can be funny, which isn't something comics readers tend to associate with Sim anymore. But though he managed to avoid the manias of his subdued schizophrenia in the first issue, it was too much to hope that he'd do so for long in a comic parodying women's magazines. The second issue has a great deal about the prescribing of anti-depressants to women and how they don't work, which in Sim's mind leads to the evils of psychiatry, daycare and how women hate to be mothers. I don't recall any of his misogyny sneaking in to this issue but it's impossible not to be aware that it's there, pulsing under the surface, and that it will inevitably break thru. Like listening to a racist who's not currently being racist, or sitting through the tearful emotional interlude of a vile, violent drunk, it's uncomfortable. I may buy the collected book when it's published in 2013 or whenever, but I don't think I'll buy the issues anymore. |
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