Mausketeers

The world went nuts over Maus I and II; they fundamentally changed the scope of comics, much like Watchmen exploded our notions of superheroes. And, Art Spiegelman earned a tidy Pulitzer for his work in 1992, which earned him a spot in the canon of literature for a comic. It still is ground-breaking. The New York Times, which is often snooty about matters literary, noted Maus as "the important literary achievement of our age."

Let's look at some chronology:

1978--A Contract with God by Will Eisner is the first comic published as a "graphic novel"
1980-1985--first chapters of Maus appear in RAW, a comic run by Spiegelman
1986--Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (4-issue limited run series) by Frank Miller is published
1986-1987--Watchmen series is published by DC

This is just a brief survey of some fundamental texts happening at the same time. There are others, but each serves an interesting purpose. Will Eisner first calls something a graphic novel, which gives new critical credence to novel-length comics. He was also writing about the Jewish experience, which we'll see in Maus. The Dark Knight series reinvigorates an the superhero, while, soon after, Alan Moore attempts to explode the superhero genre completely. Maus came out during a very exciting time in the history of comics. Many ideas about comics changed at this time, though it took a while for this to hit the general public. Still, I mention Maus winning a Pulitzer and folks look at me like I've just started speaking in tongues. "Where's the translation??"

Maus was hard to write, as you can tell from the text. Spiegelman is open about his strained relationship with his father. According to Spiegelman, "The goal was to tell [Vladek's] story. And at a certain point, I went to see a shrink who had been a Holocaust survivor of Auschwitz, who helped me get past some [mental] blocks into the second volume...My shrink, he really liked the first book, and he was trying to get the second book out of me."

Because the medium (graphic novel) sits at the intersection between "serious" biographies/autobiographies/novels, it challenges our understanding of what it can do. Maus is simply labeled as a "A Survivor's Tale." Spiegelman is not really showing his cards with that moniker. Later, however, he writes in The New York Times, which has listed Maus under its fictional bestsellers:


http://digitalhistory.concordia.ca/courses/hist403w09/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/spiegelmannytletter.pdf

This series crosses from father to son, realism to strange iconography, and challenges what history is. This is fun stuff.


Here are some questions to consider this week as you finish up on the series:

1. Why do you think Art Spiegelman chose the animals he did to represent different nationalities? What stereotypes do they convey?
2. Consider this panel and talk about the design choices and textual choices Spiegelman made. How do both text and art come together? What would happen if they were separate?