McCloud's Concepts: As Applied To Art Siegelman's "Maus"

            After finishing the reading from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, I realized that I’ve been looking at comics and graphic novels the wrong way. Now, I’ve come to understand that there’s more to it than the “entertainment factor”. This guy is a complete and utter genius. Period. He has taken the concept of the simple “comic”, and has blown it up into something that I didn’t expect at all: a true “invisible art”. Also, the few concepts he discusses in the first fifty pages help to open the viewer’s eyes when looking at a comic book. When reading a graphic novel such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, these concepts come to life and occupy these pages just as McCloud describes.

            Maus is the tail (hehe) of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, seen through comic form. It’s a biography of the author’s father and how they tended a broken relationship. By hearing his father’s story, Art is able to depict a horrifying and interesting view of Nazi occupied Europe. He decides to write his father’s story as a comic book in order to help the audience understand what exactly his father went through in his lifetime in Europe. The most interesting out of it all was the use of animals as people.

Mouse-like Holocaust victim

            By using animals, Spiegelman is showing how exactly everyone was or acted throughout the story. It all starts with a mouse: normal Jews are depicted as mice in the story to show that back then they were seen as vermin. Just think about the Holocaust and how they populated camps, were slaughtered “like rats”, and some even resembled mice. Mice can also be depicted as cute and harmless, so Spiegelman uses that aspect to show that, after the war, everyone looks normal and cute and non-threatening. Cops are also depicted as pigs, and Nazis are obviously cats.

            Spiegelman also uses cartoons for another purpose. This purpose is emphasized in McCloud’s book because writers use it all the time: self-perception. When one sees a photograph of one man, it is understood that there is one man, and that he cannot be anyone else. The less realistic a picture becomes, the more that can be perceived by the viewer. In comics, they can be used all the time to depict more than just what is seen. By using cartoon mice, Spiegelman shows that his characters are not just him and his father, but whoever else that can be seen by the viewer. If I knew someone who suffered in a concentration camp, I may see that individual within these pages. It all depends on the audience.

            These texts are good reads, and I recommend them to anyone who is interested in the realm of comics and comic theory.