Jaguar (Insurgent Comix) - Literary Analysis

Literary Analysis

Since the character's debut, The Jaguar has been interpreted and discussed in other forms. One notable example appears in Laura E. Pérez' Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities, in which the comic book was compared to Art Spiegelman's Maus:

Laura Molina's Jaguar Woman is also partly modeled on the hypersexualized superhero(ine) comic book and animation traditions. In regular life, she is a "scholar of the law" who slips into her animal double persona in order to obtain papers important in her fight against the contemporary California backlash against civil rights and people of color. Racist police and neo-Nazi skinheads are the villains in this comic-book world. The Jaguar's Nahuatl name, "Cihualyaomiquiz." the reader is told, means, "woman ready to die in battle." Linda Rivera prepares to transform into her animal spirit guide, The Jaguar though ritual and prayer.

Molina's "Cihualyaomiquiz: the Jaguar" is perhaps closer in its aesthetics and politics to the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman, given the seriousness of the social issues that the format of fantasy allow them both to broach. The repugnant reality of the contemporary California is another commonality between Molina's art and Spiegelman's "Maus" books chronicling his Jewish parents' experience of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and his upbringing in the United States in his parents home in the aftermath of those experiences.

Read more about this topic:  Jaguar (Insurgent Comix)

Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or analysis:

    Plato—who may have understood better what forms the mind of man than do some of our contemporaries who want their children exposed only to “real” people and everyday events—knew what intellectual experience made for true humanity. He suggested that the future citizens of his ideal republic begin their literary education with the telling of myths, rather than with mere facts or so-called rational teachings.
    Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)

    Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.
    Joan Didion (b. 1934)