Revised Maus Piece

I’m not gonna lie, when I think of comics the first thing that comes to mind is grown men fighting criminals in tights and outlandish garbs. Maybe I would then think to cats that love lasagna, or boys that wiff footballs, or those really political comics I never understand. But it certainly never jumps to a story about a writer interviewing his father on his time in the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust. Maybe it’s because of the first examples above, but I don’t think people grasped the idea that a comic could cover mature themes till Maus (and while mature comics had existed before Maus, Maus’s popularity brought the idea of mature comics to mainstream audiences).

It’s easy to see why a story like Maus became as influential as it was. Despite depicting a very adult and mature subject matter it’s something even children could follow. I remember friends of mine reading Maus back in the sixth grade. While it constantly depicts horrific imagery, nothing gory is ever shown. Characters swear, but it’s never anything major. And I think what adds to its appeal is the story’s subject matter. There is something so appealing about the holocaust, the fact that humanity could allow such heinous treatment of other human beings to happen and then let that go on for years. It’s hard to believe it even really happened, but it did. Like a terrible scene you want to look away from but can’t peel your eyes off of. Any retelling of a survivors experience in the holocaust is gonna be fascinating, because they all went through so much just to be able to tell their stories.

Art Spiegelman also doesn’t slack on the artwork when telling his story either, taking full advantage of the medium to add layers and depth to the story being presented. There’s an entire metaphor going on throughout the books where the holocaust victims are depicted as mice, while the Nazis are depicted as cats, showing the dominating presence the Nazi party had in that time in a way that could never be translated into a written format. It holds the narrative weight of a novel but also uses images to help deepen the impact of the story. When the audience sees an illustration of mice screaming in agony as they’re burned alive, it carries a weight with it that words could never hold a candle to. It’s for that, Maus was able to open people’s eyes to the potential of the medium. They could tell more mature stories on the level of  books or movies, and through using the strengths of the medium conveys a story only comics could tell.