Maus

I feel that Art Spiegelman handled the delivery of this story very well. His choice to use anthropomorphized characters was very smart, it helped him avoid depending on the usual stereotypes that would conflict with his message. Using animals allowed Spiegelman to also apply symbolism like the overall Game of cat and mouse since the jews were constantly on the run from the Nazis, also how each group was viewed, the Jews were seen as vermin that needed to be exterminated, the Nazi Germans were the predators and there to clear out the vermin, the Americans were the dogs that got rid of the cats, and the Poles were Pigs. Another benefit of him using animal characters is that it helps to get past many peoples
auto-response to avoid anything that looks depressing, getting the message to more poeple.

Spiegleman made affective use of the graphic novel medium. His use of diagrams laying out locations and the construction of secret bunkers was helpful for me to get a better picture in addition to getting across that Vladek is explaining and drawing these things out for Artie. I also liked how he used the pig masks to represent when the Jews were pretending to be polish.

It was interesting to see how Artie tries to keep the underground comic mentality of writing objectively, yet he is dependent on his father's biased and filtered version of things, also since his mother's journals were destroyed.

Maus  has a whole different level of complexity since it not only about Vladek's experience going through the Holocaust but also about Artie making the comic, the two of them connecting, and trying to figure out why his mother Anja committed suicide.

It is really horrifying to see and hear about the thing that were done to all the victims of the Holocaust, I had to keep reminding myself while reading that it all really happened. It's also unbelievable how clever these people had to constantly be just to survive. It's really sad though that even after going through all of that racial persecution that some people like Vladek still don't learn and continue to hold onto racism.