Maus I & II

  


      At first I didn't really like this comic, the artists handwriting sometimes was hard to read and the drawing style wasn't what one would expect from a comic. As I read more of it I started to like it, though I'm not really a fan of darker stories.

    Once I realized that it was not only based upon the artist's family's life during the Holocaust but word for word what his father and others there dictated to him it's story gained a lot more weight for me. Even more so as the artists included bits of conversation between him and others as he was compiling data for this huge project. I really enjoyed reading his fathers story and how Spiegelman did the set up for all of this information to be told. He could have just drawn his fathers story happening in real time for the readers, but instead he chose to tell the story of his father telling him the story and I find that to be a  really unique perspective to get to see. The story's not only about what happened to his father and his family but it's also about their current life and interactions.  I especially enjoyed parts where he is shown working on the comic within the comic, it makes it feel much more real and I like that.

     Something I didn't expect from this book was for the animals that represented different nationalities or groups of people to be a representation of them that only we the readers were aware of. Like when the mice put on pig masks and passed as polish, the masks even emoted like real faces, because in all actuality they were just dressing themselves as the polish would dress and acting as the polish acted. It felt weird to have their animal-ness be something that wasn't really existing. Even more so when the artists chose to remind the reader of this by sometimes drawing himself and others physically and noticeably as people wearing animal masks. Although it is again, a really unique concept that I've never seen presented in comics or media before.

   Although I've knows about the Maus comics since around middle school I'd never actually sat down and read them before, there were a lot of things I didn't expect in the general story and events that the book depicts, but I am even more surprised with how impressively Spiegelman delivers this information and has formatted this comic, it's something different and I can really appreciate that.