Graphic Novel Analysis: Maus

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Graphic Novel Analysis: Maus
Identification and Public History
Maus is a graphic novel written by Art Spiegelman. It was originally published in 1980 by Patheon Books, an American publishing company headquartered in New York. Spiegelman is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate. Born in 1948 in Stockholm, he grew up in Rego Park, New York, having relocated to the United States with his parents in 1951 (Witek). Spiegelman started cartooning work in 1960, after gaining influence from his favorite comic books like Mad. This is evident in his novel, which has a similar style as Mad, indicating that he emulates his favorite comic book style (Witek). In the early 1960s, Spiegelman contributed to early fanzines such as Smudge and Skip Williamson’s Squire. While in Junior High School, he produced Blasé– a Mad-inspired fanzine (Witek).
By the time Spiegelman reached high school, he was earning from his drawing and selling comics to the original Long Island Press and various outlets (Witek). His unique talent attracted the attention of the United Features Syndicate, who gave him the opportunity to produce a syndicated comic (Witek). However, he rejected this commercial opportunity, maintaining his view of art as an expression. Spiegelman later attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, where he met Topps Chewing Gum Company director Woody Gelman. Gelman motivated him to apply to Topps after graduating high school (Witek).
Upon graduation, Spiegelman’s parents inspired him to become a dentist, but he declined (Witek). Instead, he enrolled at Harpur College to study art and philosophy (Witek). While there, he secured a freelance art job at Topps, where he worked as the company’s creative consultant. He created Wacky Packages, Garbage Pail Kids, and other novelty items (Witek). In mid-1960s, he started selling self-published underground comix on street corners (Witek). Underground publications like the East Village Other published his cartoons, giving him the platform to advance his career. In the 1970s, Spiegelman began doing drawings and comix for the New York Times, Playboy, and Village Voice (Witek). He co-founded RAW magazine with his wife. The duo also co-edited Little Lit, a series of three comic anthologies for children.
In 1978, Spiegelman interviewed his father, Vladek, to gather information about how his parents survived a holocaust during World War II (Witek). This interview led to the publishing of Maus: a graphic novel based on a true story about the experiences of Spiegelman’s father as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The book tells the story of Vladek’s life in pre-World War II Poland, Survival in Auschwitz, Postwar life in the US, and efforts to accept the past (Kolář 227). The book also revered Spiegelman's mother and Vladek's first wife, Anja, who survived the camps but later died by suicide. In his narration, the author incorporates post-modernistic methods of the animal fable, portraying Jews as Mice, Nazis as cats, Americans as dogs, Swedish as deer, Poles as pigs, French as frogs, and Americans as pigs to heighten the reader’s empathy (Munk 55).
In 1992, Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize for mastering the holocaust narrative (Witek). The New Yorker called the novel, ‘‘the first masterpiece in the history of comic books. Spiegelman believes that comic has increasingly gained relevance in the post-literature culture since comics echo how the brain functions. According to his analogy, people think in iconographic images and language bursts, not holograms and paragraphs.
Visual/Formal and/or Iconographic Analyses
In Maus, Spiegelman highlights the holocaust horrors and his frustrations in trying to understand his father. The novel’s structure allows the reader to move freely between the past and present and engage in the challenges encountered in both periods. The author transformed the comic medium in producing this book. Using animal characters lets readers easily digest the Holocaust's graphic details. The primary use of images in Maus forces the reader to acknowledge the events illustrated graphically, unlike in prose texts that give readers (Kincade 1). Maus’s graphical nature enables the audience to recognize Holocaust's images, evoking what comic artist and theorist Scott McCloud terms ''closure'' within the reader (McCloud 63). Through Closure, the novel establishes a Holocaust’s functional history via its leadership. Reading the book allows one to understand a large-scale atrocity like Holocaust without experiencing it first-hand.
Visual Feature: Black and White
Unlike other graphic novels with colored art, Maus has people represented as anthropomorphic animals and kept in black and white. The book uses structures with frames and balances art and dialogue. The author uses a fiat comic style, cross-hatching, wood carving, black light, shadows, and shading contrasts. His cross-hatching is based on the tone of his words.
Art Style of Maus
The novel’s bleak and dark art style aids immensely in the Holocaust's atrocities, survival's bleakness, and the feeling of loss or hopelessness. The horrors are only more brought to life by how dark and evil the predominantly black, cross-hatched lines are, giving a sinister outlandish sensation. As seen in Figure 1, a German Nazi is captured viciously, beating a Jewish child against a wall by his legs. The statement ‘‘and they never anymore creamed,’’ leaves the reader horrified by some of the actual monstrous events experienced by Vladek.
Figure 1:
The Graphics of Maus
Maus' art style depicts the evil and the frightening times of the Holocaust using highly creative and impressive characters and symbols. The author's unique portrayal of the nations and different people is also ingenious. For instance, Spiegelman depicts Jewish as mice, enabling the readers to relate them to a pest or something insignificant or powerless. The author also portrays cats as German Nazis. He depicts the Nazis as cats to bring the idea that cats capture and kill mice, setting up antagonism between cats and mice (Germans and Jews) and the tone for the hunt. It also tells how powerless the mice (Jews) are. Lastly, the artist portrays other nations' people with animals leave the readers thinking critically about why the author chose this approach.
Figure 2:
Hidden Symbolism
The novel uses hidden symbols that may need critical thinking to understand. This explains why the work requires accompanying text to help readers comprehend specific images. For example, a picture shows the author's parents returning to their hometown, oblivious of where they should go or feel safe. The symbolism here shows that the road they are taking is a swastika, which could signify their land’s disappearance or insecurity (Spiegelman 125). Keen readers may identify this imagery. To understand the symbolism, one would focus on its meaning and purpose. Readers may also discuss the sense of the direction of how the characters handled the disguises, such as wearing masks when trying to dress like Polish pigs.
Figure 3:
Overall, the visuals used by Spiegelman to convey symbols cannot be easily achieved in literature (Kincade 1). These pictures appeal to the reader’s primary perception while engaging the work. While the speech balloon dialogue contains different information from the one included in holocaust literature, images that can evoke pathos paired with a narrative are presented with detailed drawings with emotions (Kincade 1). This idea is evident in an early scene where the author’s father rides an exercise bike (Figure 5).
Figure 4:
The scene focuses on Vladek's exercise, and the audience may fail to notice his concentration camp tattoo (Kincade 32). The tattoo on Vladek's arm signifies the power of the images within the novel. Seeing it sparks stronger emotions than imagining its description. Readers may overlook the tattoo because the dialogue emphasizes the mundane conversation between father and son instead of the holocaust narrative that dominates the graphic novel (Kincade 3). Spiegelman draws the reader's attention through narrative, images of a historical period, and significant events associated with the Holocaust.
An excellent example of an image paired with narrative occurs when Vladek narr...