Outstanding Technical Scene

OUTSTANDING!

For me personally there are numerous moments with Maus that I am simply blown away by. In the graceful depiction of horrific events, the honest open kindness with which Art depicts his father Vladek warts and all, and in the truly gut wrenching  comedy ( "Acch, Mala! A wire hanger you give him!").

One scene stands out particularly though. In chapter two of Maus II, starting on page 201 Art Spiegelman talks directly to the reader, depicted for the very first time not as a mouse or any other animal totem that appears across the body of the work, but as a man wearing the mask of a mouse. He sits at an easel and related pertinent information about his life and the recent "critical and commercial" (Spiegelman, 1992) success of the first volume of Maus.

Apart from the startling visual imagery of  Art Spiegelman's masterful black and white graphic style, this chapter entitled Time Flies... commences with a profile of Art at his easel wearing a ghostly inanimate mouse mask surrounded by wheeling flies and ends at a pyramid base of rotting man-mouse corpses, it is the text that really has impact on me.

"Vladek died of congestive heart failure on August 18, 1982..." (Spiegelman, 1992) is the first line and with such undeceiving bullet the seemingly immortal Vladek who survived the first volume with all its horrors and pains is gone. The death of the narrator; the jump out from the reality of the book.  Here in the second chapter the hero is dead. A great shock that seems greater still due to his vigor and life in the preceding opening chapter where he is his typical verbose and peculiar self. Along the course of the sequence Art discusses his feelings of guilt and depression, and as the narrative follows his progression through the greed of ad men and executives into a sand trap of self pity Art's character physically shrinks away on the page. As though he is removing himself, his ego, from the story. Until he is humbled enough to continue working on the book. Continue with the larger and more import job of telling his father's story.

Visible in the last panel in the upper right hand corner is the silhouette of what appears to be a concentration camp watch tower surrounded by a high fence. Art isolated, surrounded by white space atop the tower of emaciated cadavers is in a personal prison. Slumped in the doldrums he reflects "lately I've been feeling depressed" (Spiegelman, 1992).  Visually, his position is palpable, alone at the top of a tower of guilt. Often survivors guilt is discussed in relation to any of those who have lived to tell a tale and as Kyle wrote in his earlier post, Art himself suffered even more so after the events of September 11th, 2001. With those events in mind the already impactful image seem even more tersely somber