Description:
Volume 1:
A
brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic
novel ever written—Maus
recounts
the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the
Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing
cats.
Maus
is
a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author’s account of his
tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing
retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an
unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of
trauma.
Volume 2:
***WINNER
OF THE 1992 PULIZTER PRIZE***
Acclaimed as a quiet triumph
and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art
Spiegelman's Maus
introduced
readers to Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe,
and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father,
his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the
cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in
shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events
described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the
diminutive.
This second volume, subtitled And
Here My Troubles Began, moves
us from the barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskills.
Genuinely tragic and comic by turns, it attains a complexity of theme
and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. Maus
ties
together two powerful stories: Vladek's harrowing tale of survival
against all odds, delineating the paradox of family life in the death
camps, and the author's account of his tortured relationship with his
aging father. At every level this is the ultimate survivor's tale—and
that too of the children who somehow survive even the survivors.
Collects:
Maus chapters from
Raw Magazine, with other material
Author:
Art Spiegelman
Artist:
Art Spiegelman
Published By:
Pantheon;
Illustrated edition
Published
When:
Aug.
12 1986 (volume
1), Sept. 1 1992 (volume 2)
Parental
Rating: Teen? PG?
Review:
With Art Spiegelman's classic graphic novel Maus in the news lately, let's revisit and review this amazing tale. Since Maus has been reviewed everywhere from Newsweek to the New York Times to Esquire, and won a special award Pulitzer Prize in 1992, many fine words have already been written about this book. To that list I add my own thoughts, from a fresh 2022 reading.
For context: Maus has made news in recent weeks after a school board in Tennessee USA removed it from their 8th Grade curriculum. The board expressed concerns about its appropriateness for that age group, children around 13 years old, noting in particular that it contained profanities and nudity, along with murder, violence and suicides. My reaction to these criticisms will come later in this review. Click here to see the Wikipedia coverage:
Maus is a brilliant and moving dual narrative about some challenging and deeply personal topics. The story deftly weaves together the story of Vladek Spiegelman and his life amid the holocaust, with the story of his son Art’s attempts to both understand his father’s story, while struggling with his own relationship with his father. It smoothly jumps between Vladek's memories and tale, and the present tensions between father and son.
In Vladek’s life, we meet many examples of community suffering and individual strength. His survival in the face of the immense evil and persecution comes through his own creativity in the face of the challenges, his adaptability in learning new skills – whether a new trade or to whom to relate in order to increase his odds of survival, and occasionally sheer good fortune.
Racism, in both overt and subtle forms, appears throughout, and is deftly handled with the different animal species of the characters. The Jewish mice, the German cats, the Polish pigs, the French frogs, occasionally a dog or other species / race appears. You can’t help but smile to see the mice disguising themselves as pigs, with little strap-on masks, in an attempt to hide their Jewish identities.
The masks are but one of many narrative devices that perfectly tie together different threads of this narrative. After an intense several pages about the gas chambers and the ovens in the concentration camps, we switch to Art complaining about the bugs in a New York evening, and casually spraying them, while the viewpoint concentrates on the gassed and dead mosquito. And there are many more examples.
The art is a stunning blend of simplicity and depth. Spiegleman gives a master-class in conveying emotion through simple facial expressions. Panel after panel shows how the subtle changes in angle and thickness of the lines in the eyes and eyebrows can alter the expression and communicate new insights into the state of mind of the individual.
In contrast to the clean and simple faces and expressions, page after page is filled with richly detailed backgrounds. The characters will be at a table, with a visible wallpaper pattern on the wall behind them. The viewpoint shifts, and now we see them from a different angle, and glimpse a hallway with a different wallpaper pattern. Backgrounds to the backgrounds.
Nor does it stop with something so trivial as wallpaper. Every page is filled with shades and textures, a whole, rich world in which the human drama of the story unfolds. The reader is drawn into the scene, and becomes absorbed into this world.
There is no color; everything is black and white. Even shades of gray are shown through texturing techniques such as line density and cross-hatching.
Maus is not an easy read. But it is brilliantly handled. The anthropomorphic personification of animal characters and the graphical-narrative comic book format allows the harshness of the history to be communicated in a way that allows us to approach it, feel it, interact with it, with just enough abstraction that it can slip through our defenses and reach our heart with its full impact.
The challenging read and the stark, tragic harshness of the subject matter do raise questions of for whom this work is appropriate. Which brings us back to the Tennessee school board’s decision to remove it from an 8th Grade curriculum. So what of their stated reasons?
One was the presence of profanity and harsh language. For profanity, I noticed none till page 93 (volume 1), and not more than a dozen in the entire work. 8th Graders will hear far worse in the school yard on a daily basis.
What of the charge of inappropriate nudity? Yes, there is some: one panel shows a topless female, two more panels show full-frontal male nudity, for three panels in 300 pages. The nudity, while present, is completely nonsexual or erotic in any way. It is a shame that the parents and trustees cannot see past the nudity to the larger, much more alarming context of those panels. The topless female, Art’s mother, is lying in a bathtub filled with her own blood after her suicide. The nude males are being brutalized and humiliated upon their arrival in Auschwitz. Their larger contexts should be far more disturbing than a glimpse of genitals.
Is it Age appropriate? Here I come a little closer to the side of the Tennessee school trustees. Not for reasons of profanity or nudity, but for the unflinching look Maus gives us of the horrific realities of the holocaust and its effect on the lives of its victims and its survivors. It is an important and deeply moving story, and the motif of animal characters plus the medium of comics makes it therefore more able to smuggle the hard historic realities past our defenses and into our hearts. But the protective parent in me (I have pre-teen children) feels that 13 (8th Grade) may be a little young, and 15 (10th Grade) would be a more appropriate age to introduce this story. In the hands of a good teacher, this would be an awesome resource for the younger age, but absent that guide it demands a certain level of maturity on the part of the reader.
Or maybe, in my cushy reclining chair in 2022, I’ve grown too soft. Maybe our children are ready for us to stop treating them as fragile babies, and to take on a deeper understanding of history, including all its ugly parts.
Score: 5 capes out of 5
ISBN-10: 0394747232
(vol
1), 0679729771 (vol 2)
ISBN-13:
978-0394747231
(vol
1), 978-0679729778 (vol 2)
Language:
English
Pages: 160
(vol 1), 144 pages (vol 2)
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