“But here God didn't come. We were all on our own.”
Maus is both a masterful work of art and literature. It is a textbook example of a comic book. Philip Pullman, noted author of His Dark Materials, lauded Spiegelman in his chapter of Children's Book Publishing in Britain since 1945, which was expanded for an article in The Guardian. Of his artwork, Pullman states that it is "a story about anthropomorphically depicted animals, told sequentially in a series of square panels six to a page, containing speech balloons and voice-over captions in which all the lettering is in capitals, with onomatopoeic sound-effects to represent rifle-fire, and so on. So it looks very like a comic" (Pullman, 2003). The monochromatic illustrations "hark back to the wordless novels of Frans Masereel, with their expressionist woodcut prints; and those in turn take their place in an even older northern European tradition of printmaking that goes back to Holbein and Dürer. In telling a story about Germany, Spiegelman uses a very German technique."
Pullman applauds his use of symbolism in his representation of the people as animals: the Jews as mice, the Germans as cats, the Poles as pigs, and the Americans as dogs. Of this symbolism, he notes that "we are reminded by the plot itself that this classification into different species was precisely how the human race was then regarded by those who had the power to order things; and the question is finally dispelled by the gradual gentle insistence that these characters might look like mice, or cats, or pigs, but what they are is people. They have the complexity and the surprisingness of human beings, and human beings are capable of anything."
Examples of the extraordinary artwork and design can be seen even on the first page, which can be seen here in this digital version found on Archive.org.
The literature itself is masterful. The narrative is a flashback as Spiegelman's father, Vladek, tells him his harrowing experiences in occupied Poland and Auschwitz, but there is a frame story of Spiegelman living with his father while recording these stories to make the very novel we are reading. Yet, the Art Spiegelman of the frame story outside of the frame story (the one who worries about making his art and writing this novel) is not a mouse, like the Art hearing Vladek recount the tales; Art the author is a man in a mouse mask. Is he behind a mask because he feels a separation from his Polish Jewish heritage, or is it s visual tool to distinguish between the frame stories?
And what of the actual story? It is, as the title suggests, "a survivor's tale", so we can take all that Vladek tells Art as fact; he experienced the Holocaust as a Polish Jew sent to Auschwitz, and he lived to tell the tale. Spiegelman, through the frame story, tells the readers that his father was always reluctant to tell him anything, and while he is giving him interviews so many years later, it is obvious through the narrative that he is still reluctant. Every detail and every bit of dialogue is based on actual interviews with Vladek, but given the symbolic nature of Spiegelman's illustrations, we could assume some things are exaggerated or left to his imagination. That being said, after other firsthand accounts written during the experience, such as Anne Frank's diary, firsthand interviews with survivors years later are the next best thing. Despite some possible,, but minor, fictionalization, it seems to be just as factually correct as any other autobiography on the topic (Elie Wiesel's Night comes to mind). As such, Maus could be used as a great tool for younger people to study the Holocaust in a more entertaining way than simply reading or watching a documentary. This may have been a goal of Spiegelman's, though he seems to have simply had a passion for comics, a sharp and creative mind, and desire to reconnect with his father and share his story.
Pullman, P. (2003). Behind the masks. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/18/fiction.art
Spiegelman, A. (1986). Maus: a survivor's tale. Penguin Books. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/MAUSBook1ASurvivorsTaleArtSpiegelman/page/n1/mode/2up
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