OneMetal.com ARTICLE:
Must Read: Maus

This week in Must Read, OneMetal discovers why a story featuring cats, mice and the Holocaust is one of the most important comic books of all time.

In Short:

Don’t be misled by the almost Beatrix Potter style use of anthropomorphic animals found within the pages of Maus: pick up a copy and you’ll find a hugely moving, very human story which is as hard-hitting as they come. Written and drawn by Art Spiegelman, it’s a biographical story within a story, where Art, the son of two Jewish Holocaust survivors, recounts a series of interviews with his father about his experiences before, during and after World War II – experiences which saw him being interred at the Auschwitch concentration camp.

All of the characters within the story are represented by different animals depending on their nationality. The Jewish people who are the main focus of the story are represented by mice (the maus of the title is German for mouse), Spiegelman’s not-so-gentle play on words about how Nazi Germany viewed Jews as little more than vermin. The Germans are cats, Americans dogs, British as fish and French as frogs. Yet you’ll be amazed how quickly you’ll forget you’re looking at a menagerie of animals, and get drawn into the horror of the story – all the more horrific because of its real-world roots.

Why Is It So Good?

Firstly, Maus is an incredibly complex and ambitious piece of storytelling. We jump back from present day interviews between Art and his father, to his pre-war memories and experiences within concentration camps, then back again. It’s as much a study of what those kinds of events can do to an individual person as it is a study of how World War II changed the face of the planet as a whole. The biographical nature of the piece even sees the author struggling with actually writing and drawing the story itself, torn about how he’s trying to present such momentous and distressing moments in his families life as little more than stark black and white comic strips.

At a midpoint in the story, Spiegelman drags us back to the present day, as he recounts an experience of talking to journalists about the first chapters of his work. As he tells his tale, the frames slowly pull back to reveal him sitting at his writing desk on top of a pile of decaying mice, some naked, some dressed in concentration camp overalls. It’s a crisis in confidence that comes back again and again, unfolding before your very eyes, flowing straight from the mind of the artist, through the pen and to the page. “Reality is too complex for comics,” explains the mouse version of Spiegelman to his wife, “so much has to be left out or distorted”. It becomes clear that there are several points in the story where the creator comes close to scrapping the project entirely, but the comicbook world is all the better for the fact that he didn’t. It’s a rare and disarming thing to witness that kind of honesty and creative doubt in any medium, especially more so in one where super powered heroes and villains are the order of the day.

The struggle to get the story to the page could go some way to explaining why it was so long in development. It first started life as a 3 page strip in an indie comic in the early 70s, before returning again in a more developed and lengthened form in one of the most important independent comics of the following decade: Raw Magazine. The two combined stories (‘My Father Bleeds History’ & ‘And Here My Troubles Began’) were drawn together in a trade paperback – still the easiest way to get hold of Maus – in the early 90s.

However you get your hands on it, all editions have the same visual impact. The total lack of colour within the pages seems to amplify the starkness of the story. There’s just something about the pure black and white colourscheme that gives the story more gravity – and unlike another take on the story of the Holocaust, Spiegelman’s doesn’t use occasional splashes of red like Spielberg’s Schindler’s List would some years later.

It’s true that of all the books that have made it to the Must Read list so far, Maus is probably the least accessible, and certainly the least commercial of the bunch. It’s going to require some hard work, and if you don’t stick with it after the first couple of pages, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was just a jumbled mess of ideas, strung together with a gimmicky “let’s make them all animals” angle. It’s much more than that.

Every now and again you’ll accidentally find yourself accrediting the horrible acts that you see on the page down to the fact that the characters are animals, before very quickly realising that the events depicted in the pages of this book were simultaneously very human and very inhumane. It almost goes without saying, but the book deals with some truly horrific and ugly experiences in a no holds barred sort of way. It obviously tackles the Holocaust, but it also focuses down on more intimate, less well known moments – the disgust of Spiegelman’s father when Art stops to pick up a black hitch-hiker, and the author’s amazement that a man who was the victim of a racist regime could he himself discriminate against someone because of their race.

Another truly personal moment comes with Spiegelman discovering that his dad burnt his mothers diaries: the father trying to explain that their existence and the reminders that they brought of his deceased wife were too painful to live with, the son seeing the act of burning those books as an act of murder, cutting off one of the few remaining links that he had with his mum. As the book progresses, you’ll find you’re drawn into something more than a comicbook creator / comic reader relationship. In every way, it’s like a friend confiding in you about what’s going on in their life, what’s going on in their head, exorcising their demons and letting you in. And when you’re done, you’ll come away with a new perspective on what they’ve been through, how a world changing event impacted on their families, and just how powerful a comicbook can really be. You’ll never read another superhero comic in the same way again.

The Legacy

Maus is one of a handful of comics to receive widespread critical acclaim, not just from the comicbook community, but also from a much wider field. It won a special award from the Pulitzer Prize which recognises outstanding achievements in journalism, literature and music. It also picked up a handful of Eisner awards, the LA Times Book Prize for Fiction and the German Max & Moritz Prize in 1990 – something of an achievement when the subject matter is so directly linked to the darker moments of the countries history.

It showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that comics could be just as biographical, as moving and as real as any book, and deal with issues that you wouldn’t expect to be addressed in the medium. It showed that comics can be personal, can be revealing and can provide the author with a very real, visual and direct way of communicating with their audience. It remains to this day one of the most personal, intimate and moving comicbooks ever made.

So it seems appropriate that the legacy of a book that deals with such personal experiences can, just this once, be summed up by a similar personal experience of my own. In the real world, I teach 16 to 19 year olds. In a session on propaganda, the inevitable subject of World War II and then the Holocaust came up. A student raised their hand and explained he “didn’t get it.” When I asked what, he went on to say that he didn’t really understand what went on during the war, that his history classes dealt with the facts, but not what it was like for the people there. I loaned him my copy of Maus. One week later after class, he returned it. I asked him what he thought, and after a moment he quietly replied: “Yeah, I get it now. I really do.”

Spielgelman couldn’t ask for a better legacy.