Maus is a story built around the writings of a son asking his father as a writer about his time in World War II, as well as his knowledge about his son's mother he never got to meet to put it flatly. In a more educated way of looking at it, I'd say it was one of the more impressively enriching, educating, and non-age-restricted way I've ever seen someone depict the World War II Jews' perspective. The pacing, character development, and realism is all there - yet the disconnect os using bipedal animals to portray different nationalities and religions was amazingly easy to understand, because if you think about it, such things were in the mind of the Nazis - that the other races were nothing but disgusting animals. The drawing style is so simple yet rendered in a very complex way to show the positioning of things in each scene. The emotions, personalities, and actions of the characters are easy to follow and understand both visually and in terms of text. Even the broken English sells it on a whole other level.
Now pure impressed POV aside, let's get down to the nitty-gritty. The story itself has great pacing, but takes a moment or two to understand how it rolls. The beginning recounts the writer's young life, yet skips ahead years later to actually get to the story. There's some strange disconnect there, other than a good lesson learned, and from there the reader begins to see that even as the writer in the story is recounting everything his father tells him, the actual graphic novel writer is putting himself in that position and speaking in third person. It's both commendable and impressive, selling a non-fourth wall breaking method of linking between multiple chapters and keeping a down-to-earth realism despite the anthropomorphic animal characters. This leads me to another interesting bit about the choices made in this story's development: the use of animals. Normally, animals are used in modern writing and illustration as a representational medium, and here it's no exception. A noticeable quality was the Polish were pigs, the Jews were mice, and the Nazis were cats. There's clear social-casting relations here, but I won't delve deep into them for the sake of time.
Pushing on, let's look at the infrastructure of the graphic novel - it tells of a single story How I met Your Mother style at first, but then opens up into the historical problems that occurred. Things such as Nazi propaganda, the selling of Jewish businesses and expulsions with not a penny to their names, warrantless beatings, and the scared governments and social classes were eloquently pushed in this. The level of detail for a very down-to-earth experience is also incredibly impressive. An example was the father counting his pills, knocking them over, then counting them again, breaking midway to talk about a glass eye and cataracts. Those details purely aren't necessary at all, but it really breathes life into the already realistic world this all takes place in. These are real people with real problems, but for the sake of easiness on the eyes, the style of art is simpler and the use of animals instead of humans brings a lighter aspect to such a grim, dark moment in history.
Art Spiegelman, the artist of this book, really pushed to fill a hole of history in his life, and placing it in an illustrated graphic novel no doubt took a lot of him both psychologically, and emotionally. It's both a great historic piece, and a historical reminder document of atrocities that people endured in the past, both appealing to adults and even to younger audiences. Truly his work is both baffling and insightful for his time, paving the way for serious and book-level appreciated graphic novels.
No comments:
Post a Comment