BLACKOUT IN THE RED ROOM
But, I think we have to look at Ilan Manouach's Katz first.
Art Spiegelman's autobiographical comic Maus, a narration of the sufferings Spiegelman's Jewish family had to endure by Nazi Germany in the course of World War II, appears also to be a work known far beyond the medium's borders – and such without ever facing a cinematic adaption.
Moreover was it awarded with a Pulitzer prize, thus making Spiegelman the first cartoonist to receive this kind of honor. Like a duck takes to water, it became part of a canon of values and thereby a target for other artists. On the other hand, apparently the treated subjects presented in Maus, to be read as Judenhass here, make any attack seem extremely tasteless in no time.
Ilan Manouach, being descended of a Greek-Jewish family and taking offense at the attribution of various species of animals to several ethnicities, replaced every animal head with those of cats, and made the otherwise completely unchanged work public by giving it out in AngoulĂŞme during Spiegelman's presidency of the comics festival's jury ten years ago.
This subversion of artistry including subsequent action for an injunction may be debatable, but, and out of the purest kind of love, provoking an argument on reinforcing stereotypes was the artistic intention here. A modus operandi which simply makes it art responding to art.
Which the Jim Rugg drawn “parody” cover of Maus for the third and recently pulled back issue of Ed Piskor's torture porn series Red Room is not. With an almost exactly copied typographic concept taken from the first of two books collecting the Maus episodes pre-published in Spiegelman's magazine Raw, it's showing two people awaiting to get tortured in front of a camera for viewer's entertainment and payments.
That's Red Room's single and only plot point, though pretty okay with me, if you're into stuff like that. I too think it hasn't that much to add to the oh-not-so-contemporary-at-all discourse in “violence induced by consuming media and the somber sides of the abyss called internet, connecting people of all perversions capable” - it's just entertaining trash and probably finds fulfillment in that.
BUT, the original cover of Maus stages two mice, which have to be read as Jewish people in the context of Spiegelman's iconography, awaiting the murderous Holocaust. At least the Liefeld cover placed at the beginning of this piece, and I'm pretty sure it's not by Liefeld himself, but a fan photoshopped mash-up, is of an empowering and not degrading character as the one Rugg did for Piskor's series. That the latter got greenlit by Fantagraphics, doesn't make their editorial processes looking good, while having the fight for acceptance of a medium being viewed as childish written on their banner.
Well, after the seemingly in-priced online outrage, Jim Rugg was the only one to drop a convincing excuse. To my knowledge - and I’d love to stand corrected - Piskor did not comment on this emphatic disaster thus continuing to ignore the suffering of people that were murdered in an incomparable manslaughter the world had never seen before and since because of its perfidious singularity showing in an elaborate system of extermination. And, in the light of recent events, it clearly doesn't help to defend Maus against those who have an interest in banning it.
So this might just be a rather thoughtless and dumb joke from people growing up in an environment of Nazis being the villains in countless and trashy incarnations on TV and in comic books, and yes, there was a genre named “Stalag fiction” (Stalag = German abbreviation for 'Straflager', meaning 'dentention camp'), which is dedicated to give in to sexually connoted fantasies happening in concentration camps with abusers, but those were created by Jews, and they had every fucking right in the world to do so. But in the aftermath of the infuriating critique massively brought up, making use of your brain would have been a sexy thing, too.
Because, no matter the amount of blood you're splattering around during desperately trying to walk the edge, in the end it's always turning brown while drying out.
