Maus

I'd heard a lot abut Maus leading up to my finally reading it, and it had been on my To Read list for a couple of years so when I finally got the two volumes I wasn't completely sure they would live up to my expectations. I needn't have worried however, as both lived up to any bizarre standard I may have formed for them in my brain, though they were different than I had expected.

Firstly, I didn't realize that Maus was told in two separate volumes, I thought it was just one book. So when I saw that I had to pick up either two volumes or the complete Maus I was a bit startled. I went for the two books option since that's the way they were originally published and also because that came out to be the cheaper option on Amazon. I love how the two books have similarities in their binding such as the image of the crowd on the inside of the cover, but these similarities are tweaked to fit the book to which they are attached, such as the crowd shot in “My Father Bleeds History” showing a crowd of Jews on the street in regular clothes of all different shapes and sizes versus the crowd shot in “And Here My Troubles Began” illustrating the mice in their uniforms in the death camps, each identical in their emaciated and terrified figures.

The telling of the story is also different than I had expected. I thought it would just be told as a Holocaust story from the pint of view of a Jew, I didn't realize that it was told from the author's point of view as he is told the story by his father. But I feel that the inclusion of the modern life bits builds up the story, makes it more relatable in a way. Everyone can understand having difficulty dealing with their parents and getting frustrated with things they do, so seeing the son's struggle and concern about his father helps the reader become even more emotionally invested in the tale being told.

The use of animals to represent the different nationalities lends a bit of a softening to the tale. Spiegelman still creates a sense of despair and horror, even using “funny animals” as his style, but the representations of nationalities as animals makes everything, in a way, more relatable. When we were children many of our stories centered around an animal protagonist, like Arthur the Aardvark or the Very Hungry Caterpillar. As children even the trivial plights of these characters seemed monumentally life-changing in our eyes and so we related more to them with the wide-eyed innocence that is childhood. Now, as adults, the funny animals style can be used to invoke strong emotions as we see a caricature of humanity playing out horrors and plights we can only imagine.

Most “scholars” believe Maus to have heralded in the legitimization of comics, but really it's just continuing and expanding on the long-standing comics tradition. Art Spiegelman was an underground comic artist before going “mainstream” per say with Maus. In underground comics, like those of Aline and Robert Crumb, difficult issues are addressed in an uncensored and unapologetic way and Art is just taking his experiences in the world of the underground and translating it into a sort of double biography for the masses. I say double biography because the volumes tell the reader just as much about Art as they do his father. Because it is told from Art's point of view we see his take on his father's life and his interactions with a man whom he never really understood.

Maus is very much a ground-breaking comic in terms of subject-matter and popularity, but within it is contained years of previous comic traditions.