An Analysis of Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale Essay

There is an old saying that a picture says a thousand words. Art Spiegelmans series Maus A Survivors Tale proves this saying to a tee. Added to the dialogue, a million possibilities arise. The series is a biographical comic book about his fathers experiences during the Holocaust. It uses cats, mice, and other animals to present this very delicate subject. The first book in the series received tremendous adulation and received the National Book Critics Circle prize in biography. However, the critics involved in this prize were forced to ask two questions. Does a comic book represent the World Wars well or not? and Was Spiegelman right to use the humor of a comic book to express the Holocaust? I will attempt to answer these questions by focusing on Maus II And Here My Troubles Began.Using artwork combined with pictures serves many purposes. It allows the author to develop characters with a visual reference. It serves to fill in the blanks by cutting down the necessity to read between the lines to understand the big picture. These can be seen as pros and cons. So Spiegelman attempted to reduce the gap between the dialogue and the pictures.I didnt want people to get too interested in the drawings. I wanted them to be there, but the story operated somewhere else. It operates somewhere between the words and the idea thats in the pictures, which is in essence what happens in a comic.This direct quote from an unknown interview done with Spiegelman shows that he meant to use the pictures only as a tool to express his ideas. If too much emphasis were put on the pictures, then whole story would not be shown. However, if the pictures and the dialogue are read as one, then the entire story is expressed. Spiegelman says in the quote that he doesnt want people to focus on the artwork, he just uses them to help the story along.To help him...

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