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lmst340-Assignment Seven "Maus"

Maus by Art Spiegelman is a great graphic novel detailing the relationship between a son and a father, the journey of a Jewish man during the second world war and the horrible crimes committed by the Nazis. It manages to tell all of these stories in such a human and compelling way while also using mice as Jews, Cats as Nazis and pigs as the polish people. I most definitely think that this anthropomorphization of the animals reflects on how the different parties, Jews, Nazis, Poles all saw each other through the war, not as humans but as different species. Something else that really stood out to me was the artwork from this graphic novel. It really surprised me that there was so much detail in every single panel, while also remaining very simple and straightforward to understand. From simple things like drawing characters face with a line on the profile to make it seem like they are worried about something or someone, to important details like the armbands they used to identify jews drawn even on background character in a panel full of people. As well as the small interjections between father and son midway through one of the stories really help make this graphic novel feel alive. The dark themes of this novel are accentuated by the art style used, it really lends itself to be used in darker themes, the jaggedness of it as well as the cross-hatching shading really give it a really somber feel. The overall story starting with prewar life where he still was just a young man and ending with him being reunited with his wife postwar and then going back to the present and we see him reconnect with his son for the first time in years, thanks to this wonderful novel his son is writing that now we can enjoy. The story feels very personal, as it should, seeing as Art Spiegelman actually interviewed his father and the entire graphic novel is actually just that, what came out of a two-year-long interview between a father and a son.

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