Action!
To paraphrase Jim Bob from the agit-pop alternative duo
Carter USM "If you're looking for ACTION; you came to the wrong place!"
In Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer prize winning graphic memoir
Maus the viscera and violence of the Second World War feels close. You can smell the beer and bratwurst on the hot heavy breath of the jackbooted Nazi-cats
hounding you round every corner; leering in every thick black brush mark or
fragile pen scratch. Thankfully, due to
the artful craftsmanship of Spiegelman, the bombs and bullets remain constantly
one page turn away. A distance is nurtured
from the "action" reality of
the situations being described firstly by the framing of the story in the
recollections of Art's father Vladek, who at the beginning of the book is cantankerously
retired in the Rego Park neighbourhood in the New York City borough of Queens and
further developed by Art's own generational distance from the events of the
book. A heavy reliance on text to form images and drive the story, derived no
doubt form the aural delivery of Vladek combined with the loose line art style
employed further separates the reader from explosive situations and moments
such as the described events of 1941 on page 82. Whilst the violence in the
scene is transparent the threat and claustrophobia that one could have felt,
panicked in such a situation is mitigated by the staging. The violence is
mainly viewed from a safely elevated perspective, looking down upon rather than
trapped within the action. Even the device of framing the younger Vladek in a
star of David on the second line of the page creates a white barrier from his persecutors,
albeit a sharply barbed one.
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