Week 7: Maus and the Legitimization of the Graphic Novel

Art Spiegelman's Maus, is an illustrated interview where he asks his father about surviving the Holocaust. The story is dramatic, emotional, and gripping. Spiegelman presents his father's story in a straightforward cartoon way, with Jews represented as mice and Nazis as cats. The simple mouse masks make it easy for readers to empathize with the protagonists. Along with the eloquent visual storytelling, they make the book easily accessible to non-comic readers. The cartoon style and anthropomorphic allow the reader to approach otherwise horrific situations in a direct way, without the use realistically explicit images, while still retaining the power of the experience.

The present day sequences give us an unsentimental portrait of this survivor of the death camp. Spiegelman doesn't glamorize his father as some sort of hero. Vladek, his father, comes across as irritating, manipulative, exasperating, and even bigoted. I wasn't expecting some humor, but it was there, though often wry and situational. It's a very rich, well-rounded book that opens your eyes more about the experiences that survivors of Auschwitz and other death camps went through to tell their amazing, emotional stories of life and death.