Maus: A Survivor's Tale - Art Spiegelman

What would be your reaction if I told you someone had produced a comic book about the Holocaust? One that actually employed cute-looking animals as metaphors for the protagonists? Probably the same as mine was - shock and disbelief. I mean, how could such a medium adequately portray one of the most horrific events in history without appearing flippant and irreverent? The very idea seems profane. If the person who first drew "Maus" to my attention hadn?t been an individual whose opinions I have always held in great esteem, I would have steered well clear of it. Instead, I went out and bought these two volumes, not knowing really what to expect, ...  Read the complete review

Conor got it down from the shelf. I hadn't read it in years. And I wasn't sure whether to be glad or not. Maus is a powerful book. It tells one of the saddest stories in a history of sad stories man has created. Maus is the story of the Holocaust. It's told in comic strip format and that, of course, is what had attracted Conor. I said it was a very sad book and was he sure he'd like to read it and he said he was sure. So together we read. Maus is written by Art Spiegelman, an American cartoonist. It tells the story of his father's experiences under the Nazi regime, how he and his family avoided the concentration camps for a ...  Read the complete review

A comic on the holocaust? The Jews depicted as mice and the most infamous concentration camp as Mauschwitz? I had read positive reviews on the book and had to find out how that worked, if it worked at all for me. Art Spiegelman hasn’t invented the genre but he’s certainly expanded it, he’s created a unique graphic book by the subject he’s chosen. The author (from the cover) ‘a contributing editor and artist for the New Yorker, cofounder/editor of Raw, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics’ has made first and foremost a classical comic, i.e., ‘a story about anthropomorphically depicted animals, told sequentially in a series of square panels ...  Read the complete review

It's quite a lengthy graphic novel, and is an account of the Holocaust, with mice representing Jews, Cats as the Nazis, Americans as dogs and Pigs as the Polish. This is a brilliant conceit, and the writer makes full and effective use of it. This is harrowing and incredible, but very real and present and with very human, flawed characters that hit home beyond what a film or a book can do for a wide range of audience types. The illustrations aid the narrative, placing soft, engaging images and dark atmosphere into a bleak tale....It seems a very 'neat' story in places, but perhaps there is some memory allowance here. It's another important piece of historic ...  Read the complete review

I studied Maus as one of the books for my dissertation on Holocaust literature. As a piece of Holocaust literature it is completely unique. It is hard to know where to start with what makes Maus so special yet so important to read. For a start Maus is narrated in comic form. You may think this is an inappropriate method to relay the Holocaust yet it allows Art Spiegelman to illustrate his interpretation of Vladeks (his fathers)story through a use of symbology and metaphor. The characters in the comic form appear as animals depending of their nationality, for example: the Jews are rats, the Germans the cats, Americans dogs, the French frogs and the Polish are ...  Read the complete review