Maus

When starting to read the comic, I was expecting something a little more historical or like the books we read in middle school such as “Ann Frank”or "Night". Maus was an extremely personal story like those books but it was more then just a holocaust story. It captures his family and also Spiegelman as a person. Spiegelman story telling was very immersive even though he used animals instead of people to tell it. The style is so simple that the animals are easy to read as symbols for Jew=mouse/Polish=pigs/Germens=cats/Americans=dogs. You can really feel the prejudices in the story from how they look and also how the author probably felt about them.

The personal story of Spiegelman is really heart breaking as every chapter starts with him talking to his father and we see his decline in health and watch them bicker. We see the effects of after the war before he begins to tell the story. I felt this way of starting his novel to be more captavating becuase of its relatablity. I had hard time pulling my self away from this comic.

I thought it was really interesting when Spiegelmans dad finds his first underground comic. The switch of the style and also the switch from animals to people was really interesting and separates the reader from Spieglman’s story and the story he is trying to write about his father. It gave enough information to understand that he was deeply hurt by his mother’s suicide and how he needed to cope.

MaThe fact that it was an underground comic was kinda cool because we just talked about underground comics last class and how they kept the comic alive and thriving. I think it helps show the age of which Maus was written but also shows us who Spiegelman is a struggling comic artist.