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

Colour!

Continuing the discussion on colour check out this New Yorker cover depicting the Twin Towers. On the left side is how the original cover appeared printed black gloss on black matte and on the left is a lightened version so you can clearly distinguish the silhouettes.
I feel this depicts Spiegelman's mastery of colour perfectly.
You can read more about it here

Colour!

COLOUR!

In dealing with the heavy and often grotesque events that form the narrative bulk of Maus, Art Spiegelman utilizes colour to intensify the sometimes somber and serious tone and subject matter but in such a way that he can still jump from different times, events and perspectives in a coherent manner. The gloriously graphic swerve of Spiegelman's artistic style makes concrete the recollections of his father Vladek in totemic lines of black on white. I couldn't even imagine how one could stomach the events depicted in some scenes of human degradation, fire and murder is they were rendered in full bodily colour.  Similarly if the scenes with Vladek as an old man were rendered in the colours of the  60's and 70's when Art was writing there would be a disconnect for the palette choices of today's generations, ruining part of the timelessness that the black and white images possess. It is in the black and white reality of Mickey Mouse that the events take place, the brutality tempered through abstraction and strengthened through its cohesion.

In Schindler's List (Spielberg, 1993), the black and white style was similarly used to great effect. In that film however the bloody red of the swastika was used to highlight the innocence of a little girl in a red coat. Totally out of place in the mire of horror that surrounds her. Would Maus have been significantly improved by employing similar selective highlighting tactics? I don't think so. But what is your opinion? Below I have taken a copy of page 232 from Maus and added red highlight to the fire. 

Action!

This type of action is thankfully lacking! There is no onomatopoeia heavy brawls and hyperbole bronzed physical fights in Maus, elevating the graphic genre into a more culturally rewarding medium. In my opinion...

Action! continued...

Action!

Although the stylistic choice of depicting the various characters as animals  creates a degree of separation from the subject matter of Maus, Art Spiegelman draws the viewer into the emotional realities of the action that he is depicting through ingenious and irregular staging. Panel sizes do not remain consistent throughout the book, although some pages do use the device to create a sense of plodding linear doom. On page 34 the intense moment of Vladek arriving in Czechoslovakia and seeing a swastika flag for the very first time is intensified further as the panel sizes increase down the page, from the slender borderless train at the top through the train window like boxes of the second line and exploding finally in a oversize splash of the flag itself and the agitation it causes in the trains passengers. We, the reader sit in the carriage with the mice, part of the action. Enthralled as they appear to be in the image.

ACTION!

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!"

carter USM; A Sheltered LIfe

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.