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Legitimization of Comics: Maus

This week I read Maus by Art Speigelman, a graphic novel in which Speigelman interviews his father about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.


One thing that struck me about Maus was how raw and unedited it felt. It feels like Speigelman didn't leave anything out in his interactions with his father--where many documentaries or other kinds of interviewing would portray a Holocaust survivor in the best way possible, Speigelman shows what feels like every minor quibble and annoyance between he and his father, like his father's habit of putting down Speigelman's mother. Speigelman does this within the Holocaust story as well-he doesn't cut out any of the minor events in favor of more important ones, he just tells it like it happened. I appreciate Speigelman's honesty with this style of storytelling in Maus, but I cannot tell whether I enjoyed it or not--it was honest, yes, but felt unnecessary at times.


One thing I definitely enjoyed about Maus was the characters being animals. I thought it was a very odd decision when I first heard of the comic, but on actually reading it the animal aspect really helped to both instantly show the frightening social dynamic of the time (the jews as mice and the Nazis as cats) and get me to be able to relate more to the characters. As Scott McCloud explained in Understanding Comics, we can insert ourselves better into more generalized and cartoon characters. Because Maus is such an intimate family story, I think I would have felt detached if the faces were all rendered realistically. However, with the cartoon mouse faces with almost no individual features, I felt that I could really visualize myself and my family being in that situation, and become more emotionally involved.




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