Maus

Maus may have helped to legitimize comics as a form of literature, but to me it really felt like your run-of-the-mill Holocaust story. Sure some things were different, and there were things that I liked about it, but I guess that I am limited to how much I can enjoy reading a story about such a depressing era in human history.
Art Spiegleman made some rather controversial choices with characters in this book. The nazi’s are portrayed as cats, the Polish are drawn as pigs, and the most controversial of all, was his choice to use mice to represent the Jews. Now I would see this immediately as an illustration of the Jews’ meek and helpless position during the war, and also a use of the age-old cat vs. mouse archetype to emphasize the hunter and hunted relationship between the nazis and the Jews. Some however could see this as accusing the Jews of being like rodents, or more specifically, rats. Even the manor in which Spiegleman draws the mice, they can tend to look somewhat like rats.
The entire tone of the story also makes it a tough read. It’s quite depressing. Not that I would expect a story about the Holocaust to be uplifting, but the grim and hopeless situation certainly has an effect on the reader, and maybe that’s why this is held with such high regard. From an animators stand point though, I found a lot of the poses difficult to read, as well as the facial expressions due to the rather limited drawing style.
Something major that bothered me about this comic, came not from it’s pages, but rather from the idea that it made people accept comics as a legitimate literary form. I am frustrated by the fact that in order to be legitimate, comics had to address a topic that has been approached time after time by media after media. Every time we hear of the Holocaust it’s generally the same story, I mean nothing new has happened with that since it ended. So why couldn’t comics be considered legitimate for the morals that they instilled in readers, or perhaps just be valued for their ability to make us care about the lives of these characters. No, they have to tell us what terrible creatures humans can be in order to be taken seriously. It makes me wonder if this is true of all media, or if comics just had to overcome their reputation for being irrelevant brain-melters.
Over I wouldn’t say I regret reading Maus. It had its strengths, and I did like that despite the known danger the characters were in, there is a sense of hope portrayed, as short lived as it is.