Way before I had ever heard the term graphic novel I was a comics fan, raised by comics fans in a wider family of comics fans. I had graduated from Asterix, to Mad Magazine, to Marvel/DC and then 2000AD, which blew my young mind.
In 1991 I caught a documentary on Art Spiegelman and Maus, which floored me. It was the first time I realised that comics could address even the most serious issues, just like a novel, but graphically – they should coin a term for that. I bought it as soon as I got to university, big city = proper bookshops.
The idea was so simple it was breath-taking, as the best ideas invariably are. Dealing with his father’s survival of the holocaust, Spiegelman drew the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, the Americans as dogs and the Poles as pigs. The simplicity of it hits hard.
The story of Maus is every bit as much the story of Spiegelman and his father’s difficult relationship as it is of Auschwitz. This gives the story so much resonance and context, more than a straight-forward retelling of the atrocities. Spiegelman shows us his intense frustration with as well as his love and respect for his father (his mother committed suicide 20 years after the war) and I love the generational story that plays out between them. It feels very real, as does Spiegelman’s agonising over the creation and success of Maus at times.
You don’t need me to show you what happens in Auschwitz, the sheer industrial-scale cruelty and inhumanity; Spiegelman’s whole point, look what happens when you stop seeing races as humans. Maus is very good at breaking events of such enormity down to the trivial, banal things that, in conjunction with raw chance, you needed and had to do to survive, as well as the guilt that attends that very survival. Of everything I have read on the subject, only Primo Levi’s work is more vivid and matter-of-fact about the necessities for, and of, surviving.
Maus is drawn deliberately in a simplified fashion, playing with that contrast between our ideas of comics as children’s fun and what they are depicting. That cognitive dissonance heightens the emotional impact considerably.
In these times when the ‘anti-fascists’ are labelled as the bad guys we need art to tell these stories, to bear cultural witness to the worst. I only have a tangential link to these events but it is one I treasure, an anchor point to history that should never be forgotten.
Read this graphic novel.
No flippant titles or countdowns today folks. It should also be noted that Maus has been criticised for its methods and its own monolithic racial depictions, especially of the Poles.