WEEK 7 assignment : Art Spiegelman, Maus

On page 111 of the second book when Vladek said, ‘there! I’m starting to feel human again!’, I felt like every essences from the story, tragic, bitterness, happiness has been summed up into one sentence. All emotions I’ve felt from observing his mighty struggle started to crystalize into a kind of intuition. An experience reading Maus was worthwhile, I thought. And it was surely quite a depressing experience. Who wouldn’t have felt anything from learning about holocaust and the cruel nature of war. I face palmed several time while reading. I knew that the author didn’t have an intention to darken the story but it is already dark in it’s nature. And that I think is clever and what make this comic artistic after all. 

What I think was a genius in the craft of this comic book was the way the story has been told without unnecessarily over dramatizing it with film-like characters and elements. By telling a story as memories of the past, readers can be less detach to the tragedy and the story can be told as what they really are. Art Spiegelman as he portrayed himself in the comic take us another step back from an involvement with the war and more about how generations after felt about it. The way he symbolized characters into animals also reminded me of Scott McCloud theory. It was easier to feel involved with stylized characters than realistic human characters.

Portraying people from different factions into different kind of animals make audiences feel less judgmental toward specific idealism or nationality as there’s no real image of cruelty of human on human. This stylization also suggested that Nationalism and Racism played big part in the competition for resources during WW2. Personal background become an undeniable factor in the incident. It also reflected that in true nature, different kinds have an ability to live in harmony with one other(with of course unavoidable conflict from time to time)upon an exchange of profits and sometimes sympathy. Sometimes conflicts can also occurs among one own kind themselves due to ideal and resources. The true disaster starts with the idea that only one kind should exist without another, thus, bring an imbalance and chaos to the world.