Gabrielle's Reviews> The Complete Maus

"There's only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days." - Neil Gaiman.

"I don't care for these new Nazis, and you may quote me on that!" - John Mulaney

Fucking Hell.

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This is not an easy graphic novel to read. The illustrations are beautiful, but the simple black and white style reminds the reader that the subject matter is one of the darkest periods of modern history. This very personal glimpse into the horrors of the Holocaust touch on many complex emotions: loyalty, fear, survivor’s guilt, anger…

Art Spiegelman’s father Vladek is a Holocaust survivor, who grew up and lived in Poland, was drafted into the Polish army, lived in a P.O.W. camp, the Jewish ghettos, was eventually sent to Auschwitz and saw countless family members and friends die before the end of the war and his eventual relocation in America. The graphic novel tells the story of Art getting his father to open up about his life and tell him what he went through, as he himself tries to understand why he struggles to connect with Vladek.

I hadn’t expected that roughly half of this book is actually about Art coming to terms with what his parents endured, with his issues making art about the Holocaust and making money (not to mention getting famous) off this work he feels incredibly uneasy about. There was a history of depression and possible mental illness in his family (you learn early on that this mother was depressive and committed suicide) that their history probably amplified. He uses an interesting meta approach to discuss this, illustrating conversations with his wife and therapist, to illustrate that the experience of creating this graphic novel was a struggle on many different levels. This harrowing portrait of the multi-generational consequences of war is probably what gutted me most as I read this: even long after the bombs stopped dropping, damage continues to be inflicted on people who weren’t even born during the war because of the unimaginable reality their parents had to survive.

This book has historical significance both from its subject, but also because it was one of the first graphic novels that got serious academic interest, and the first to ever win a Pulitzer Prize: the medium had often been dismissed as comic strips before, but Spiegelman’s use of metaphor and the very intimate story he chose to tell showed that graphic novels were not limited to Superman and Archie stories. This makes “Maus” an important and seminal work that’s worth a read if only on that basis (and yes, I am aware that underground comics had touched non-traditional topics before and used a post-modernist approach, but I am strictly talking about more mainstream publications).

The representations of different groups of people as different animals bothered me at first, because it felt like an easy generalization. But I read an interview with Spiegelman where he discusses where the idea comes from (old German propaganda films that depicted Jews as vermin, for instance) and also that he wanted to underline the absurdity of dividing people by assuming that each ethnicity has a uniform look or set of physical traits that defines them as human beings. I get the point he is trying to make: the anthropomorphic animals also make the incredibly difficult subject a little easier to absorb. I’m not sure I could have read the whole book in a couple of sittings had the drawings been more realistic.

Imperfect but highly recommended.