Maus

The series Maus is a an amazing book from the content that was written about to the images that were presented.  Maus speak about how was like to live during the Holocaust as a Jew.  The was Spiegelman presents the story to the audience is very unique.  He gives each race a different animal type.  The Jewish are represented as mice, the Polish are represented as pigs, and the Nazi are represented as cats.  I love the metaphors that he creates with the character representations.  From this book I was actually inspired to take some of my stories from concept and rework them so they were not so literal but created a deeper metaphor between the characters and how they were represented.

The images presented in the book heavily support the content Spiegelman presents, by making the audience feel very uncomfortable and putting the audience in the awkward positioning observing the brutality of living during the Holocaust.  All of the images are very busy and do not have much blank space within them.  The backgrounds are very noisy with extra lines for shading, where as the characters are very blank and empty.  There are not any facial expressions due to the build of the characters.  The emotion is created through the compositions Spiegleman creates and the staging as well as how much noise and breathing room is given to the audience.  Every once in a while the images break their frame and throw the audience off guard.  Characters are very similar and do not show any variation.  The characters are also never fully isolated on the page.  The picture that Spiegelman has made makes me very uncomfortable to read his book, but in his case it just adds to the beauty of the piece.

My absolute favorite image in the book is when the character is explaining how he has lost two of his brothers and that his family has fallen apart.  The page has multiple images on it, and many of them are actually part of a whole image.  There is a shot where the character is leaning down while sitting and the image has been sliced into five parts.  The character is represented in a broken mess where he is reflecting on what has happened, the image sliced up is the perfect image to get that message apart and it is absolutely beautiful.  This book was amazing and the articulation of the information through images was spectacular.