Ways of Seeing, or Thoughts about Visual Representation

Lately, I've been wishing that I knew more about visual arts.

I've always had a little bit of a preoccupation with sight: three guesses why. (If it takes you three, that's kind of sad. Not that I'm judging. Except that I am. Just a little bit.) And I've been thinking about visual representations for the last couple weeks(ish) for different reasons: Inception, for one. Maus, for another. The illustrated copy of Dante's Divine Comedy I recently acquired.

(To detour for a brief moment: I don't think it matters whether the top stops spinning at the end of Inception. Cobb clearly thinks he has found exactly what he wants, so even if he'll eventually wake up, he's still happy for the moment. That said, I thought the film was masterful. Props to Christopher Nolan.)
.
Anyway, I have a lot of knowledge--some useful, some not--in my brain about literary representation. I've never felt uncomfortable analyzing my way through novels and dissecting different points of view, different descriptions, etc., etc. But I've recently found myself reading (Maus) or rereading (Persepolis) graphic novels, and I wish I knew more about analyze the artistic representations at work.

In some ways, I don't need to be able to analyze the art itself: writing a graphic novel, on its own, strikes me as an inherently interesting way to portray history and autobiography. Drawing a cartoony version of yourself acknowledges your own skewed self-perception, sometimes to a dramatic extreme. Persepolis actually features a page devoted to Marjane Satrapi drawing how she perceived her visual appearance changing as she grew older--and unsurprisingly, she's fairly hard on herself.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out the effects, either, of Art Spiegelman choosing to draw Germans as cats, Jews as mice, and Poles as pigs in his narrative. I don't need help with that part of artistic representation. But I also can't help wondering if the way Satrapi and Spiegelman draw holds other stylistic significance. Are they showing clear influences? How much does their artistic style correlate with their heritage? (From what I've read, Satrapi's style shows clear Persian influences... but I'm taking others' words on that.)

For now, it's a mystery. But I'm starting to hunt down more information about visual art, so hopefully it won't remain a mystery forever.