"Arthur's Hawai'i Pt. 1" Graphic Story

Inspired by the concept of "post-memory"—the unconscious ways that the experiences of previous generations bleed into the present—in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, this piece is a graphic narrative based on a series of interviews with my father. On the surface, it is a biography and graphic reimagination of vignettes of my father’s experiences, but through drawing visual parallels between my father and myself throughout, I intend to show the ways in which his story is not limited to the past and is intertwined with my own experience. The motif of bricks in the story references the panels of the work itself, as I think about the context of my life, the unlikely fact that I even exist, and the ground that I stand upon, through my father’s stories. By using my father’s exact words and including snippets of my own thoughts during the making of the novel, I attempt honesty and transparency in the inevitably subjective genre of storytelling.