Maus 6pts

 I was surprised by how willingly Vladek recounted his horrific experiences, which normally people with PTSD might try to avoid because it could trigger a negative reaction. Maybe he had some therapy or time to process in the 30 or more years between the end of the war and when his son wrote Maus. However, he still exhibits small habits as responses to his experiences. For example, he grew sensitive and irritable, causing him to argue with his second wife a lot, especially about money issues. Because of the scarcity he lived through in the Holocaust, he didn’t want to waste a single bite of food or money on anything not immediately necessary. He pinched pennies even to the point of exchanging mostly eaten food at the grocery store in the second volume. Anja, Vladek’s wife, must have always had a more sensitive disposition, and surviving that ordeal likely drove her over the edge to take her own life; this seems like the overarching theme of the books since Art Spiegelman asked so much about his mom and wrote another story about trying to understand her death. Every survivor had to learn how to live again after what they experienced; I can’t imagine how hard that must have been to actually go through something so horrific first hand. 

Spiegel had an interesting metaphor going by representing people like a variety of animals, but I mostly appreciated the moments when he broke his own metaphor. For example, when Art’s wife Françoise asked about what animal her character would be, Art described a magical transformation when she converted to Judaism. But before that, she would have likely been a frog, like the other French people in his book, which itself is an interesting choice considering its slang meaning as a slur in that context. I wonder to what extent he used racist stereotypes or common characteristics associated with particular animals when choosing which species to use. When talking about his therapist’s pets, Spiegelman broke the barrier again. Besides that, I couldn’t help but think about how separating the races visually, while humanizing animals, dehumanized the people. In a sense referring to the Nazis as cats almost desensitizes people to the reality that people are monsters sometimes; our own worst enemy could live next door, a fellow human, a wolf in sheep’s wool. No one initially expected these people to rise up so strongly against another group until it had gone too far, but saw them as just their European neighbors before things turned ugly. Even today we can mistake an enemy for an ally if they deceive and manipulate so thoughtfully. I liked how Spiegelman had the mice sometimes wear pig masks around town. This subverted the bad guy living among victims, but propaganda likely led people to view Jews as the bad guys to convincingly justify shipping them off to death and taking their possessions. While the visual metaphor worked to an extent, I think in some ways it diminished the story.