A second favorite to Mr. Lovenstein Presents Failure. This has the same format as Failure (with the extra punchlines on the verso, which are brilliantA second favorite to Mr. Lovenstein Presents Failure. This has the same format as Failure (with the extra punchlines on the verso, which are brilliant), though I found this to be a little more bittersweet. ...more
Some of these made me truly LOL (a real audible guffaw), but presented all together, one after the other, the humor got a little tired & I got bored. Some of these made me truly LOL (a real audible guffaw), but presented all together, one after the other, the humor got a little tired & I got bored. Which is a super shame! Beautiful art & I love the animal subjects!
Rating, 3 (maybe a generous 3.5) stars. Good in small doses. (ﾉ∀＼*)...more
I would categorize this a collection of political cartoons (even though Mazen writes multiple times that his blog is not political), or an art journalI would categorize this a collection of political cartoons (even though Mazen writes multiple times that his blog is not political), or an art journal... But it's definitely not a graphic novel. -Though the pages are "sequential," each posting stands on its own to tell its own story of the 2006 Lebanon War. So, not a graphic novel, but something else.
Like Joe Sacco writes in the introduction, Mazen "does not offer a political assessment of why they (Israeli bombers) are there or examine the claims and counterclaims of the protagonists. He simply vents his anger..." and this blog is both powerful and emotionally evocative because of it. And, also kinda weak and somewhat?/highly? problimatic because of it too.
The powerful:
-Mazen posts/draws multiple times a day, so the feelings of a forever conflict, a horror that never ends, grows with each page you turn. It just goes and goes and goes.
-The dark pages are especially powerful. My favorites are July 18, depicting a little figure at a desk with a candle glowing in the corner of a large dark page with exploding bombs/stars, alongside the words, "We Resist." And July 26, which is two white word bubbles on an inky black background, translated as, "How can I show what I am feeling? / How can I understand what I am feeling?"
-The "every day life" pages showing what is left/available in the supermarkets.
-August 14th's image of a cluster bomb with a white ribbon. (Didn't know what it was and I had to stalk Google for a bit before I found an image that I could connect with Mazen's drawing/horrific words.)
-The pages/entries of color at the end.
The weak:
-I did not like how Mazen drew six-pointed stars (representative of Stars of David/Jewish Stars) alongside five-pointed stars to depict Israeli bombs. Pgs. July 17, July 20 (drawn on July 19), *July 25, *Aug 2, Aug 4, and Aug 12.
-*July 25 and *Aug 2 are especially horrible as Mazen straight-up draws Stars of David in the stars of the United States flag and EU flag, respectively, playing up the age-old 'Zionist Jews run America/the World' conspiracy theory.
-More hidden/not so hidden antisemitism throughout: At points Mazen can't upload images to the blog and writes a post instead. On July 25, Mazen writes that he is unable to post & feels paranoid. What if he's "being stopped" by "somebody." It's quite obvious who Mazen thinks that "somebody" is, and should have/could have just put "somebody" in parentheses (((somebody))). (P.s. It was just a connection problem and his blog continued.)
And on August 1, Mazen posted an image of a veiled Virgin Mary crying over the corpse of Jesus. In English it says, "Breaking News. The Israeli Army identified one more bearded terrorist and his veiled terrorist mother." Which isn't even a disguised allusion to "Jews killing Jesus". It was a bit much.
-On July 27 Mazen writes another blog post, this time with a plea: "PLEASE DO NOT POST ANT POLITICAL COMMENTS ON THE BLOG. THIS IS A BLOG DEDICATED TO ART. AND AS SUCH, IT VOMITS ON ANYTHING CALLED POLITICS." Yet. Yet, Mazen makes political comments all the time on his blog/in his art. He plays a morbid numbers game with Lebanese and Israeli casualties, comparing the two, in the most horrific and unnecessary way. Life is life, why do you have to cheapen Israeli/Jewish life by asking for more innocents to be killed on one side?! (Reference to the post on Aug 2, titled "And now, let's play with numbers.") Why can't we elevate all life and mourn and condemn the horrible killing of Lebanese innocents while not calling for more death? (*Innocents, because Lebanon did not differentiate between combatants and civilians when reporting casualty numbers.) ...more
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