Art Spiegelman

I'm glad to have discovered this story of the Jewish tragedy, based on the artist's recording of his own father's experience. From a distance I didn't know what to make of the swastika cover and cartoon mice; was someone trying to score a quick buck with a macabre comic? Quite the opposite, this is a heralded Pulitzer Prize winning classic among graphic novels. When I sought to borrow it from the library, I discovered it was filed in the non-fiction section. That is indicative of how show more seriously it takes its subject matter, never mind that it features anthropomorphized mice, cats and pigs.

Why animals? Transforming the human characters into animals tips the emphasis from "this happened to Jewish people" toward "this happened to Jewish people." It highlights the very quality the Nazis wished to deny them. Pigs for the Polish seems like an ill-selected choice, but they are unmistakably preferable to the Nazi cats. The distinguishing of one race versus another by animal type is of course meant to be silly, and a commentary itself on the ridiculousness of racism.

The number of times Vladek and his wife escaped death is truly incredible. It's transparent that only the lucky and quick-thinking survived the ordeal of the Holocaust, when so many arbitrary events arose to kill those around them. Painfully few people could be trusted, and virtually all assistance had to be purchased with quickly diminishing funds. This is only the first half of the story, and I'm glad to have the second half ready at hand. show less

Rating: Powerfully Moving

Maus is the story of the author / graphic artist and his fraught relationship with his elderly father. It is also the story of his father’s experience growing up in Poland and surviving the horrors of the holocaust.

The reader experiences the harrowing and miraculous life of Art’s father through powerful imagery and metaphor, with the Jews drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats.

It’s a story of history that cannot and should never be forgotten, ESPECIALLY in show more today’s global political landscape. Everyone should make time to pick up this extremely powerful and moving story so that we may learn from the past and remind ourselves to condemn the widespread hate, racism, and bigotry that led to the deaths of millions of innocent people. We cannot let that happen again, but we are seeing the horrors that letting those sentiments fester in modern society can produce.

It’s not an easy read, and there are parts I definitely recommend reading with an adult beverage in hand. But it is a story about the miracle of human ingenuity and the power of hope in the face of unthinkable evil.

Go pick up a copy and read it for yourself.

Part 2 of 2 show less

This is a very clever way of presenting not just the horrors of the Holocaust, but the ongoing consequences for the survivors and for the survivors' children. In this graphic novel, Spiegelman recounts the story of his parents' experiences as Polish Jews during the Second World War, using the conceit of representing each character as an animal. Jews are mice, Poles are pigs, Germans are cats, Americans are dogs. For me, at least, the artwork had the curious effect of making what happened show more seem not more remote, but more immediate. Our awareness that the concentration camps existed is something which occasionally is blunted by distance, by time, by the fact that there are fewer and fewer people still around who survived those places. The reader doesn't have that luxury with Maus. Every time the art shows one of the mice being shot, beaten, hanged, gassed, you think, but these were really people. They were really people. show less

Una historia más sobre el holocausto judío durante la II Guerra Mundial. Sin embargo, su formato: cómic, ofrece un enfoque y unos matices muy sugerentes. Los díbujos no son especialmente artísticos, de líneas sencillas, tan monótonos que en ocasiones el contexto o los diálogos son los que facilitan distinguir entre los personajes. Ésta indiferenciación no es casual, sino metáfora de la humillación y el anonimato a que se vieron sometidos los prisioneros en los campos de show more concentración reducidos a un número grabado en la piel. En cambio, el zoomorfismo de las distintas nacionalidades: gatos alemanes, perros americanos, ratones judíos, cerdos polacos, …; ayuda a la comprensión de las diversas situaciones sociales que se produjeron durante el conflicto bélico.
Si los críticos se empeñan en utilizar la extraña palabreja de metaliteratura, ésta obra sería un metacómic, es decir, el cómic dentro del cómic. Realmente “Maus” es la historia de la elaboración del cómic “Maus”: recopilación de testimonios paternos, documentación, búsqueda de fotografías. reflexión sobre la capacidad del cómic para contar el holocausto, la elección de unos animales u otros para representar a los personajes o exposición autobiográfica de los sentimientos que llevan al autor a escribir la historia: culpa, confrontación paterno-filial, ausencia materna,…
Pero es tal la fuerza de la historia contada por el padre que prevalece sobre cualquier consideración intelectual y literaria. Un relato duro, cruel, en el que los gestos de aparente generosidad esconden un pragmático interés, donde los sentimientos se ven anegados por la realidad de la supervivencia y en fin, donde los supervivientes se plantean si en el fondo han sido ganadores viendo las secuelas que les han acompañado a lo largo de su vida. show less