One of Maus' strengths lies in how (deceptively) easy it is to read. The narrative (or narratives - more on that in a second) comes across almost effortlessly. The stylistically spare but highly expressive drawings accompany text which drives the narrative; there are few wordless panels to be found. Indeed, many people who are intimidated by the comics form itself find remarkably little difficulty in following the story, owing to the book's clear, carefully presented storytelling - a seemingly radical departure from Spiegelman's large body of experimental "comics about comics". The important observation here, however, is that Spiegelman wields his bag of formal narrative tricks as much as ever, although here in a far more sophisticated, less flashy fashion. It's only with concerted effort that you begin to notice just how Spiegelman has permeated almost every page with innovative layouts, sophisticated temporal transition, and artful panel compositions. In other words, the first time you read Maus, you get caught up in the book's story; on subsequent readings, however, you can get equally caught up in exploring the book's storytelling.
Narratively, the book is structured in a series of temporal layers. At the core lies the story of how Art's parents (his mother, Anja and, particularly, his father, Vladek) survive the Holocaust. Actually, as the book often stresses, it's not really a story of how they survived; pinning blame or reason on a story such as this is almost impossible. Rather, it's a story which explains that they survived and how these experiences continued to affect not only their own lives but the lives of everyone around them, especially their son Art. The second story-layer functions as the "present" in Book 1; in this story, Art reacquaints himself with Vladek (and Vladek's second wife Male, herself a survivor) almost solely for the purposes off recording his father's story in order to create Maus. An in-between state is presented by the inclusion of Spiegelman's Prisoner on the Hell Planet (1973), his memoir of Anja's suicide, rendered in a highly expressionistic style. Maus II's chapter entitled Auschwitz (Time Flies) adds an additional layer, which takes place after the publication of Maus I and presents Spiegelman attempting to deal with the fame which that book has brought him - and the problems such fame presents, both personally and artistically.
It is this combination of times and stories which lends Maus much of its richness and reward. By presenting so many juxtapositions of past and present, Spiegelman can explore questions of witness, guilt, dependance and obligation both verbally and visually. Conversations between Vladek and Artie segue to narrated history and back again, often on the same page; we can see the influence of the past on the present. In Maus II especially, we witness Spiegelman's ambivalence about the book's (and his own) success, from the page layout in Auschwitz (Time Flies) which creates the impression that Art's pipe smoke doubles as exhaust from a crematorium to the back cover illustration, which melds the stripes of Vladek's camp uniform with the book's UPC code. These temporal and thematic balances come about naturally, almost organically as the overall story progresses - a testament to the power of the comics form to present narrative nuance and depth.
Of course, the cat-and-mouse metaphor itself presents abundant food for thought - while it does effectively convey the impression of Nazis as hunters and Jews as prey, might it not also condone the idea that there are indeed separate races of people? But throughout the book Spiegelman acknowledges this tension, exploring his metaphor both through language and visual representations in ways far too numerous to delineate in this brief essay; suffice to say that this animal conceit serves, paradoxically, as a powerful, ever-constant reminder in the book about difficulties of inter-personal relationships.
One of the marks of good literature (in comics or prose or what-have-you) is that work demands and rewards careful re-reading. Maus deserves its acclaim as one of the most significant comics of the century and as an important literary work of distinction.
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