Short and Sweet

Spiegelman's work is compelling. It defies graphic novel stereotypes by writing about something other than superheroes. It teaches us about the Holocaust and gives us Vladek's experience.

Maus is entertaining yet informative. It is more appropriate for younger audiences since it uses cartoons and not actual Holocaust photos. In summary, it is Spiegelman's attempt to make sense of his father's past, which is something he could never retell from memory (being a second generation survivor).

Spiegelman represents different nationalities with different animal heads and shows us that it is ridiculous to create such radical boundaries between people. In the end we are all human.

Spiegelman brings his message to a close and demonstrates his story is real with his comic Prisoner on a Hell Planet. He also gives us three photos of his family (Richieu, Anja, and Vladek).




All in all, Spiegelman uses his comic talent to retell this story to us in an extraordinary way. He uses it to retell the survivor's tale.

Prisoner on a Hell Planet

Have you ever walked out on your mother after a fight, not knowing that would be the last time you ever see her? How guilty would you feel for not making your last moments worthwhile? 

Close your eyes. Imagine it's a late summer night. Imagine your mother comes into your room and asks for a goodnight's kiss. Would you blow her off, or would you return her kiss?

Ok, so you blew her off. Now what? The next night you go over your girlfriend's house, and you don't come back until late. There's a crowd of people outside of your house, but you don't even want to imagine the worse. "No, it can't be. There's no way," you reassure yourself.

Next thing you know, you're at a funeral. Your mother lays dead in an open casket in front of you. She has killed herself and left no note. Now, open your eyes.

Fortunately, you are not at your mother's funeral, and none of this actually happened. For Art Spiegelman, this story is a reality.

The year is 1968, and a young Art Spiegelman is just relieved from Binghamton State Mental Hospital. He gets out after what he describes as a "casual" LSD addiction. Not long after he comes home, his mother Anja commits suicide.

It's a little less than twenty years later, and Artie visits his father to help him fix the roof. Vladek is obviously upset about something, so Artie goes to the kitchen to see Mala. She shows him his underground comic, Prisoner on a Hell Planet, which is a story about his mother's suicide.

Artie is surprised that his father read the comic, since he doesn't even read Artie's work when Artie "sticks it underneath his nose." This comic was different. This comic was personal.

According to Mala, the comic was very "accurate", which she knows since she spent a lot of time helping out around the house after Anja's funeral. For Vladek, the story brought up memories of Anja, but he was happy that Artie got it "out of his system."

The comic is very different from the rest of the book. Everyone seems like zombies, and it looks like it takes place in hell. Just look at Vladek. His eye sockets are dark as night and he looks lifeless. It's as if Anja took Vladek's life with her in the suicide.

For another thing, the characters are humans and not mice. Why?

Artie didn't live through the Holocaust, so he actually couldn't show us how it was. This is one of the reasons I believe he uses mice. He acknowledges that he is a second generation survivor, so he cannot use humans to accurately retell the story. Anja's suicide, on the other hand, is something he actually lived through. It is something he experienced in person and wants to show us what it was actually like.  

Artie's intends for us to think of the characters as humans even when they are represented with mice heads. This makes the story more real. He uses actual humans in Prisoner on a Hell Planet to make the story even more synonymous with reality. In a nutshell, Prisoner on a Hell Planet is Artie's haunting memory of his mother's suicide and is an inspiration to his work.

Making it personal

Cats and Dogs

Mice are Jews. Cats are Germans. Poles are pigs. By making every race a different animal, Spiegelman wanted to show how absurd it was to divide people by these lines. In the end we are all human. 

Spiegelman uses three real life photographs in Maus book 2. One of his brother Richieu.  One of Vladek. One of him and his mother. Why? Why does he go from mouse to human?

Art dedicates Book 2 to Richieu and his own children. He provides us with the picture below. It is Richieu. We no longer think of him as a baby mouse but as a baby boy. The baby mouse was poisoned and therefore the baby boy was poisoned. Spiegelman gives us Richieu's picture to let us know the story real. Because it was real.

Vladek Spiegelman was not perfect, but he sure was a fighter. We get to know Artie's father through interviews and mindless banter. But we don't really know him until we see him. This is the handsome Vladek we know. The survivor. This picture is how we will remember him.

Another photo is of Artie and his mother Anja. Sitting happily with his mother's hand on his hand, Artie is blissful. We see this picture in "Prisoner on a Hell Planet". Artie feels responsible for his mother's death. In "Prisoner on a Hell Planet", he wears a jail uniform. He is convicted by his guilt and shame. It wasn't fair that Artie lost his mother. She made him happy. He loved her.

Three photos. Three memories. Three family members who have come and gone: Richieu, Anja, and Vladek. Why does Spiegelman just use family pictures in his book? Perhaps it's because his family members were the ones closest to him. In fact, for Artie and his family, the Holocaust was and still is a reality.

Whether Art draw mouse or human, we feel Spiegelman's pain. We already begin to associate the mice with humans as the novel progresses, so these human photos really make the story personal. They put faces to the characters and make the story credible. The photos bring a story about mice and nazi cats together in a way that makes Maus the survivor's tale.

Why Mice?

"It all started with me trying to draw black folks"

How did Maus come to be? Why did Spiegelman choose mice?  In 1971, Spiegelman was chosen to be a part of the comic "Funny Animals". He was going to do a strip in this comic about the black experience in America. He would use "Ku Klux Kats and an underground railroad and some story about racism in America." But then he changed his mind. He wanted to do something else.


He wanted to retell the survivors's tale as it was in his nightmares and childhood. He turned the Ku Klutz Kats into Nazi cats to tell his own story.  In the New York Review interview "Why Mice?", he said, "I realized that this cat-mouse metaphor of oppression could actually apply to my more immediate experience. I was more viscerally affected by, the Nazis chasing Jews as they had in my childhood nightmares."

 

Spiegelman began to do his research. He watched a 1940s documentary called "The Eternal Jew" and learned that Nazis dehumanized Jews as rats. This made them easier to kill. But is this where Spiegelman got his mice idea? No. Not completely.


He used mice for other reasons. According to David Mikics, in his book Considering Maus, “Spiegelman’s use of theriomorphic characters functions as a shield, enabling the presentation of a history that would otherwise be intolerable in its horror and would devolve into a raw account of personal nightmare.” (Mikics, 20) What the hell does this mean? --> (translation) if Spiegelman were to use humans, it would be too graphic. This would be like teaching an infant how to swear. We don't have to expose our children to the dark side of life at such an early age. It's inappropriate.

 

Let's face it. Mice heads just make everything less gruesome. Look at the following two pictures:

Before Maus

After Maus

I know what you're thinking. Both pictures are disturbing. But are they equally so? No. "Before Maus" is much more haunting since the dead bodies are human and they are real. 

I personally would rather have my child exposed to Maus than before actual pictures of the Holocaust. Wouldn't you? I remember I visited the Holocaust Museum when I was in seventh grade. I wasn't prepared. What I saw was scaring. I saw a little boy that could have been me.


Then I imagined my family. All of which was in a concentration camp. Who I cared for dearly. Taken aback, I walked away and came across the following photo:

   


It was all too much. I couldn't handle it. Too much chaos; too much suffering. I went to my teacher and excused myself from the exhibit.

Kids brains are like sponges, and these aren't images we want them to absorb. We must first expose them to Maus, so they can remember the Holocaust. These younger audiences can teach their kids. Their kids will teach their kids. Maus makes this possible. Maus makes it more appropriate for younger kids to read about the Holocaust and harder for the survivor's tale to be forgotten. 

A gentle introduction

     Maus: Understanding the Survivor's Tale:

Comic books aren't real books. Who are we kidding? They're just what you read in the paper every Sunday -- if you're lucky and your dad purchases funnies. Wrong. There is much more to comics than meets the eye. What's that you ask? Well, let me tell you.

We all know Superman and Batman,  but do we also know Vladek Spiegelman? The answer is probably no, unless you have read Maus. If you haven't read this book, then you need to. Vladek Spiegelman, unlike Superman or Batman, is not a hero in the supernatural sense. He is a hero through his undying will. He is a hero who survived the Holocaust. The true power of graphic novels is not only the stories about superheroes and fighting crime. It is also about telling the extraordinary story of the common man. 

What is the common man? Is it the man who wakes up in the morning to go to his cubicle and earn a living for his family? Not quite. (Nothing against desk jobs) The common man is dynamic. The common man is flawed.  The common man is human. Maus isn't a story about a superhero overcoming treachery to save the day. It is a true story about a second generation Holocaust survivor that makes sense of his father's past with mice, cats, dogs, and pigs. Art Spiegelman even admitted to wearing a mouse mask when writing Maus (what the hell?). 

Heck, Spiegelman didn't even intend for his novel to be a success in the first place! In an interview with Rafael Pi Roman, Spiegelman was amused that Maus was a "cross-over hit" and "was actually of use to people."  Coincidence? I think not. Spiegelman's story is rich with Holocaustal history. Maus' grip over his father's past apparently "articulated something that other people needed to have articulated:" the survivor's tale. 

Give me a reason to read this book. Well, not only did it win a Pulitzer Prize (no big deal),  but it is one of the most renowned graphic novels. Through this novel, readers gain insight into the conditions families lived under during the Holocaust and how they coped afterwards. It is an more appropriate way to educate younger audiences about the Holocaust.

But is the Holocaust really an appropriate subject to teach our children to start out with? The answer is this: it can be, with the right resources. Tune in next week and I will tell you why Maus is an acceptable resource for younger students to study the Holocaust.