Welcome to Marwencol

Where we see the world most clearly is in our mind. We take in visions of the happenings around us, blend it with who we are and where we’ve been and create a synthesis reality—then we reside there. This is how we find some comfort, some security in ourselves and decide how we fit into the greater world around us. Some launch themselves into the world from this comfort zone, socializing quite freely. Others don’t. For those more reticent, the interior world retains a greater importance—a place to retreat. So, imagine you are divorced thirty-eight-year-old raging alcoholic cut off more and more from those around him. The interior life, though unfocused and ragged, is largely what you have left. This was Mark Hogancamp before he show more was beaten nearly to death—when he finally emerged from a coma and eventually the hospital, he would find that the few threads that still bound him to life did not include his memory.

While the book deals with the assault, most of the book reveals how Hogancamp rebuilt his life. His interior life swept away, he created an exterior one to replace it. Using a childlike imagination focused through a damaged adult lens, the doll inhabited WWII town of Marwencol was created. As if refilling an emptied bookshelf one story at a time, Hogancamp lived through the characters in this town as the good guys representing his friends battled Nazi bad guys standing in for those who attacked him. He captured these stories with marvelously detailed photographs—perfectly angled shots of precisely posed dolls create moments at once intimate, dramatic and cinematic. These photos populate the second half of the book and were what ultimately brought him to the attention of the world at large (including a major Photo Exhibit, this book, a very well received documentary and recently a less well received major motion picture). Despite such attention, he still zealously maintains his privacy.

The photographs wield a strange power. Each is of an almost perfect moment that seems to tell an entire story. Yet each could also be the opening scene of an epic. Hogancamp’s scrutiny of every detail, his day after day of attention layered over the town like brush strokes, have hewn life into the hard plastic of these dolls. Th e power is like a tide that escapes Hogancamp and crashes upon Marwencol only to recede back into him once more. That give and take is life. It was pure chance that this story escaped into the limelight. How many Marwencols are out there in other forms that we will never know about. How many people yearn for them but don’t know where to look. How many people live one step away from the rest of the world.

Ratings are always somewhat personal and inexact. In this case if the book were viewed merely clinically, perhaps I would have given it 3 or 4 stars instead of 5. In this case I have chosen to rate according to impact. I was moved by the world building involved and staggered by how that world spun once set in motion.
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Welcome to Marwencol tells the story of Mark Hogancamp. Mark is the subject of the movie, Welcome to Marwen (December 2018) starring Steve Carrell

• Welcome to Marwencol is a hybrid art and storybook about Mark Hogancamp and his imaginary World War II—era town of Marwencol.
• Learn about Hogancamp's life before and after the attack which left him with no memory of the thirty-eight prior years of his life, including his ex-wife, family, artistic talents, or military service
• This astonishing story of the redemptive power of art shows Hogancamp's process with behind-the-scenes photos, capsule biographies of each Marwencol character, descriptions of each miniature building, and Mark's insight into constructing and photographing his show more world
• Includes 100 pages of Hogancamp's photographs and stories laid out as a graphic novel

"Fight scenes, dramatic rescues and love triangles are painstakingly arranged to play out before Mr. Hogancamp's camera. The resulting images are startlingly lifelike, poignant and, for him, therapeutic."—The New York Times show less

The real story.