I first read art spiegelman's "Maus" several years ago, when I was just beginning to realize that comics were actually entertaining and/or could be considered serious literature. This coincided roughly with reading the entirety of Sandman and Transmetropolitan, so my initial education in the medium was pretty illuminating. Like most people, I already knew that the holocaust sucked - erasing 11 million people in the service of hatred just isnt a pleasant chapter in the book of human accomplishments. I'd read Elie Wiesel's "Night" and seen the film "Life is Beautiful" in high school, but that had essentially been the extent of my education on the matter.
"Maus" was something else. Where "Night" had been merely a window into an uncomfortable world I couldn't really come to grips with, and "Life is Beautiful" was primarily entertaining (well, as entertaining as the holocaust gets), Maus had felt real. It had impressed me so much that I bought copies to share with my father (and sharing comics with my father, I have found, has been a difficult proposition - one thing that art and I can share).
Ironic that I found a comic book about cartoon animals more real than these other efforts, but, it is what it is. The power of Maus, for me, had largely been a matter of its historical completion - it wasn't just a story about the holocaust, rather, it was also a story about the difficulty of telling a story. The vignettes of art's more recent struggle to identify with his father's past ones meshed perfectly with the story as told - it made me think, really think, about not just the story at-hand, but the nature of stories in general. No longer was the holocaust just an isolated event in history to me, but an ongoing effort to ascertain the whole structure of it…to a variety of ends, both personal (in both art's case, and mine) and historical (as to preserve the memory of its afflicted, the pain of its descendants, and the meaning it holds for everyone else who becomes aware of it). Self-identification with the events had metastasized somewhere between panels of cats and mice. I can't really ever hope to understand the holocaust, and when I read the bit where art expressed his own inability to fully appreciate what his father went through, it made me realize how ultimately hopeless my own quest to understand truly was. I feel both a deep sympathy for art's frustration and a disappointing spectre of personal, conscious defeat at the hands of time and history. Fuck.
I read Maus again recently, when I was on a comics-reading spree (driven both by this class and my recent passion for the medium), and the time between my initial reading and the more recent one had allowed me a heightened level of appreciation for what lurks inside its pages. As a result of this, I went looking for more of art's work; I read "Prisoner on the Planet Hell" and "In The Shadow of No Towers", both while doped up in the dentist's chair during the in-between stages of a root canal. This was also, coincidentally, my first real introduction to the comix genre. Is the confluence of those two things not somehow appropriate?
Something I've said about Maus from time to time is that t proves a comic doesn't require incredible artwork to function as an incredible piece of storytelling. Sometimes it just needs an incredible storyteller.
I've decided to not discuss my darker feelings about the specific events that art depicts; much has been written about the misery of history, and my thoughts about those are mine alone to bear.
Thank you, art spiegelman.
