Commentary on Maus

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to read this classic and powerfully influential work from comics history for this class. This is one of those landmark pieces that I’d hoped to read in this class, something that changed the course of comics history completely and the idea of what a comic can be. Maus has a very no-frills approach to visual storytelling that makes a point of prioritizing content over style which gives the narrative a sense of familiar realism at times, and at other times excels at creating blunt and immediate emotional impact. It’s a perfect marriage of form to function.

It’s almost embarrassing for me to analyze this work when I know that many people who are much smarter than me have likely written entire thesis projects and dissertations around the literary/artistic significance of all of Speigelman’s choices.

As I read Maus one of the aspects of it that struck me most was the effectiveness of the animal masks to represent different groups. Since the facial features of each species are drawn almost completely identically, characters are reduced essentially to dressed-up stick figures, far more symbol than physical presence. Because of this iconic approach the comic is a very fast read, and the story is incredibly legible. This blows my mind somewhat; clearly differentiating between characters while using such sparse defining characteristics as Speigelman manages to do throughout the book requires incredible skill in understanding and creating visual clarity. And the effect is powerful. In using the highly approachable medium of comics, Spiegelman has enhanced the reach of this incredibly difficult and painful story and made it impossible to deny the humanity of the characters.

One other fascinating aspect of so literally highlighting the similarity between characters of the same species/heritage is that they enhance two things: creating automatic audience empathy toward others who look like the main characters that we are rooting for, and displaying the division of groups that Nazis capitalized on to create hatred and fear of those who are different. If groups are separated, it is much easier to dehumanize them, and thus much easier to justify terrible actions against them. Humans like to feel loyalty to their own social groupings, and this natural tendency has been exploited by fascism to encourage violence from the past all the way through the present. If we perceive people as being different enough from us, it’s simple to forget that they are people at all.

The state of the world today concerns me. I worry about how as survivors of the Holocaust people are dying out, people are already happy to forget what happened less than a hundred years ago and start repeating the same mistakes. To touch back on last week’s themes of the responsibility of the creator, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I could someday use the same tools Spiegelman does to encourage exposure of/empathy for the stories of the marginalized and forgotten. People seem to need constant reminders of the humanity of others in order to stop doing evil. I’d like to contribute to those reminders through whichever medium I can.