Week 7: Maus

While reading Maus I enjoyed noting the variety of visual techniques that Spiegelman utilizes to get his message across. Some of my favorite moments include the map drawings, which quickly helped me understand the size and location of the camps. The schematics of the gas chambers and the stitching of shoes were also interesting in how much detail they provided, although it was mostly explained in words as well. I also like the moment when Vladek's flashback of the four women hanging mixed in together with the time he was speaking. I like how that visual trick served as an exaggeration of how long they hung. To me one of the most interesting moments was when the book flashed forward to the present at the time of the writing the book. I was intrigued that he presented people as wearing masks of their particular cultures. Since masks are disguises, I came to think that Spiegelman's meaning behind this was that people's birthplaces and the particular cultures they come from aren't a true reflection of the individual behind the mask, since he drew their distinctly different human ears and hair cuts sticking out of the back of the masks. I found it really interesting how all of the characters didn't have any individual features besides clothing, so when Vladek ended up in  Auschwitz in prison garb he was difficult to distinguish as an individual, which puts the reader in the same place that the Nazis were in their own thinking. It was also great how Spiegelman helped the reader keep track of Vladek via the captions and by what the characters said.

I am always interested in the balance of text to imagery in comic books, and especially what purpose each one serves. In Maus, the visuals typically distinguished who was talking and where they were, or they illustrated the text in the captions or word balloons. From what I can tell every single panel in this graphic novel has on average two fields of text associated with it. This is due to Spiegelman using the captions of his father's dictation as a narrative guide throughout the story. These captions provided a thorough understanding of Spiegelman's conversations with Vladek. They also helped characterize Vladek through how he describes the events of his past and also his broken English showed his age and background. The text clearly guides the narrative as opposed to the illustrations. Granted that the way the words are illustrated was quite ingenious at times, but the images rarely served their own independent function plot wise, it usually only helped to make analogies. One example of this is when Anja and Vladek pretended to be Poles and Anja was not disguised as well as Vladek was. You can clearly see Anja's mouse tail sticking out from under her coat, which gives her away. While this is an interesting way of depicting what the author meant, it doesn't necessarily contribute much besides a clever image. It illustrated what's already written below the images in the caption.

I like the use of images for moving the plot along and including something that the words don't already explain. In that sense it's possible to fit more content per page both in terms of plot progression and increasing the depth of the story. Words are good at some things and images are good at others, comics can utilize the strengths of each. This is the beauty of comics.
Maus utilized this idea well by using showing different anthropomorphic animals as members of different cultures. Since it's a visual metaphor it allowed me to quickly recognize the culture of each character, without an overt caption explaining it in text. This fact is important in this story in particular, because just by drawing a character as cat or a pig served to create tension or ease at the speed of seeing an image.

Overall I feel that Maus is an amazing piece of meta-writing. Most of the things that I had concerns or quibbles about were resolved by rereading or by thinking about it for a minute. It makes sense that Maus was reviewed by book reviewers, since it was really quite word heavy, and I'm really glad it was. Although I personally prefer having the visuals being more of a focus, I found Maus to be an utterly magnificent and enchanting.