Animal Symbolism Choices in Maus:
Mice - Jews: pestilence, breed rapidly with large amounts of offspring, live silently among people, hard to get rid of.
Cats - Germans: hunt mice, protect the home from pestilence.
Pigs - Poles: Jews don’t eat pork and consider the pig a dirty animal; for the prodigal son, having to take a job living with pigs was for him the ultimate disgrace.
Fish - British: the British have been long renowned for their navy.
Dogs - Americans: “man’s best friend”; the liberators.
Frogs - French: double meaning – frogs are slippery, slimy; frogs can change into princes (Art’s wife, a Frenchwoman, converted to Judaism).
Reindeer - Scandinavians: from the north.
Art Speigelman writes:
Why Animals?
“Maus, my comic book about my parents’ life in Hitler’s Europe, uses cats to represent Germans and mice to represent Jews…It was the Nazi’s idea to divvy the human race up into species… to ‘exterminate’ (as opposed to murder) Jews like vermin, to use Zyklon B-a pesticide-in the gas chambers… Cartoons personalize; they give specific form to stereotypes. In Maus, the mouse heads are masks, virtually blank, like Little Orphan Annie’s eyeballs-a white screen a reader can project on.
Your Thoughts: ______
Why Comics?
“In making Maus, I found myself drawing every panel, every figure, over and over—obsessively—so as to pare it down to an essence, as if each panel was an attempt to invent a new word, rough-hewn but streamlined. Every panel had to become the shortest definition of itself. It’s what images aspire to, and what is meant by the old saw, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Actually, in comics, as well as in other cases where words and pictures combine, the words often function to constrict the pictures’ open-endedness. A picture with a twenty-five-word caption may be worth only 375 words.” (Source: Art Spiegelman, in “Mightier Than the Sorehead,” The Nation, January 17, 1994: 46.)
Your Thoughts: ______
CATS, MICE AND HISTORY - THE AVANT-CARDE OF THE COMIC STRIP (The
By Ken Tucker is the popular-music critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer.
SINCE 1980, a self-described ''graphix magazine'' called Raw has published six installments of ''Maus,'' a comic strip written and drawn by Art Spiegelman. In ''Maus,'' Mr. Spiegelman recreates the experiences of his parents, Polish Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis during World War II. A remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness, the strip is also striking in another way: its protagonists are drawn as mice; their Nazi captors are represented as cats. Co-edited by Mr. Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, the magazine's publisher, Raw is usually published twice a year in New York. Its 12,000 copies are sold mainly in bookstores around the country. Perhaps because of Raw's limited circulation, few people are aware of the unfolding literary event ''Maus'' represents. Bernard Riley, curator of popular and applied graphic art for the Library of Congress, says the strip's narrative structure and its social and political themes make it comparable to 19th-century literature. ''It's good, serious work,'' Mr. Riley says. '' 'Maus' brings back an excitement that has been lost in comic art. You get the feeling reading him that you're on the cutting edge of graphics, a field that has been stagnant for a long time now.''
Mr. Spiegelman tells the story of his parents as he first heard it, through a series of conversations with his father. The artist himself appears in the strip as a laconic narrator-mouse in jeans and a rumpled shirt, perennially puffing on a cigarette. He and his father take aimless walks through the latter's Rego Park, Queens, neighborhood or sit around a small kitchen table while Art coaxes the stoic Vladek Spiegelman to tell the story of his life: Vladek's early career in Poland as a textile salesman; his courtship of and marriage to Art's mother, Anja, in 1937; the couple's internment in a Nazi concentration camp and their escape in 1945. Mr. Spiegelman explores the legacy of that period. Most of the Spiegelman family - grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins - either died or disappeared. His mother eventually committed suicide and Vladek subsequently married Mala, a Polish concentration camp survivor. Running through the story is Vladek's unrelenting obsession with his experience at the hands of the Nazis. This is an epic story told in tiny pictures. The drawing in ''Maus'' is blunt and unadorned. Characters are sketched with a few lines in black-and-white panels and shaded with the most elementary crosshatching. As art, Mr. Spiegelman says, ''Maus'' is intentionally simple: ''seeing these small pages of doodle drawings - rough, quick drawings - makes it seem like we found somebody's diary and are publishing facsimiles of it.'' The cartoonist Jules Feiffer, the author of the ''The Great Comic Book Heroes,'' observes that Mr. Spiegelman has ''found a new way to express a unique and personal view of life. He is by no means pretentious and yet absolutely true to the form.'' Mr. Spiegelman's characters stand, dress and speak as humans; they just happen to have long, narrow, white, mouse faces.
Why mice? ''A few years ago I was looking at a lot of animated cartoons from the 1920's and 30's, and I was struck by the fact that, in many of them, there was virtually no difference between the way mice and black people were drawn. This got me thinking about drawing a comic strip that used mice in a metaphor for the black experience in America. Well, two minutes into it, I realized that I didn't know the first thing about being black, but I was Jewish, and I was very aware of the experiences of my parents in World War II, so that pushed me in that direction. ''What amazed me was that I have continued to find parallels, some of them painfully ironic, to this artistic metaphor. For example, in 'Mein Kampf,' Hitler refers to Jews as 'vermin.' I saw a Nazi propaganda film in which shots of crowds of Jews in a busy marketplace were contrasted with shots of scurrying rats. There is also a short story by Kafka called 'Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk' which portrays Jews as mice. ''All of these things served as buttresses for what I was attempting,'' Mr. Spiegelman says. ''Then too, I needed to deal with the characters as animals to have some distance from the materials - in an early version of the story I started out doing portraits of my parents, but it became too sentimental. Comics is a language of signs, and by using these masklike faces on top of what are real people, the metaphor remains useful, and adds to the story a resonance it wouldn't have otherwise.''
This is Mr. Spiegelman's triumph in ''Maus'': he tempts sentimentality by suggesting a pop-culture cliche - wide-eyed mice menaced by hissing cats -and then thoroughly denies that sentimentality with the sharp, cutting lines of his drawing and the terse realism of his dialogue. Six chapters of ''Maus'' - 119 pages of a work expected to number about 250 pages - have appeared in Raw. When the strip is completed - in about two years, Mr. Spiegelman estimates - Pantheon will publish it in book form. In the meantime, it will continue to be serialized in Raw, where Mr. Spiegelman and Miss Mouly try to present the comic strip as a narrative form as capable of telling enthralling stories as the novel or the movies, as a medium for the discussion of political issues and social causes, and as an experimental, often abstract art form. Does it sound odd to speak of comic strips in such serious terms? Can a medium whose most pervasive representatives are the perennial best-sellers Snoopy the dog and Garfield the cat possibly interest serious readers? Only in America would these questions even arise. Comic strips - prized as a fresh, even radical variation on fine art throughout the world, particularly in Europe and Japan - are in America widely reviled as the lowest of the low arts, aimed, most adults assume, at young children or im-mature eccentrics. Few Americans who are otherwise well-informed and open-minded in cultural matters seem aware of the excellent, sometimes innovative work being done by a small but prolific number of comic-strip artists. This group includes Dave Stevens, the West Coast writer and illustrator of ''The Rocketeer,'' a super-hero parody that offers lovely, meticulous color drawings of 1930's Los Angeles; Gary Panter, a Texan, whose intentionally primitive comic-book version of art-brut has made him a cult favorite of both art gallery owners and punk-rockers; and Sue Coe, an English artist whose harshly drawn, highly polemical ''How to Commit Suicide in South Africa,'' was published by Mr. Spiegelman's Raw Books last year. Mr. Riley, of the Library of Congress, says ''the collective efforts of Art Spiegelman, Sue Coe and other new artists will change political satire in our time.'' C OMIC strips with political or avant-garde esthetics, with intentions beyond mere entertainment, are not new; if anything, challenging cartoonists had more exposure early in this century, when Winsor McCay's hallucinatory ''Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend'' and George Herriman's proto-Abstract Expressionist ''Krazy Kat'' first came into millions of innocent American homes as part of the Sunday newspaper. By the 1960's, however, the newspaper comic strip and its companion format, the comic book, had become so tediously familiar, so segregated as a diversion created solely for children, that a rebellion was almost inevitable. By the end of the decade, ''underground comics'' had appeared. They reveled in colorful tales of drug consumption and explicit sex, and unleashed at least one genius - the savagely misanthropic and witty Robert Crumb -and a whole generation of original artists. Mr. Feiffer notes that '' 'Maus' is not a 60's work - it's not countercultural at all. There is no reason why a much larger audience than the one that usually reads comics could not become engrossed in 'Maus.' '' With the fading of the 60's counterculture, many artists have moved away from the sex-and-drug excesses of the underground-comic era. Their new goal is to expand the very notion of what a comic strip can do, to make intelligent readers reconsider - and re-ject - the widespread notion of, in Mr. Spiegelman's phrase, ''comics-as-kid-culture.'' There is disagreement about the value of such efforts. Bill Blackbeard, director of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, says that ''Comics are usually read by an audience that reads for excitement or amusement alone. It's an audience that doesn't want to read for serious purposes. Spiegelman's work challenges those assumptions.'' Bernard Riley says Mr. Spiegelman ''takes underground comics into new territory, making comics over into a kind of psycho-history, with highly literary and meticulously observed autobiography.''
Published: May 26, 1985The New York Times