Page 8: Marital Blitz

Hopefully I'm doing this right...

I like Spiegelman. He's crazy, but he's honest, and because of that you feel like you really can relate to his complete dementia, even if your insanity it's not directly related to 9/11.

I was really struck by the piece, Marital Blitz on page 8. I had to read it a couple of times to get what was going on, and I still feel like I don't totally grasp it. I really love how Spiegelman illustrates his paranoia. It's a bit unsettling when you witness his wife transform from a woman about to take a shower to a bearded terrorist. Really bizarre, but it gets the point across; that his paranoia really is detrimental not only to his mental health, but also to his relationships with others.

I'm still kind of confused as to why he used the "Bringing Up Father" characters for that specific strip. I finally looked at the later plates and realized that he drew his artistic interpretations directly from old strips (which helped make sense of a lot of the book...), and that for "Marital Blitz', Spiegelman drew his inspiration from Plate VII, but I only get a rough correlation: they both worry, they both want to sleep, they both recognize problems. But still, why that character with that specific situation?

Matt