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Anybody ever read Maus by Art Spiegelman? It's a pretty unique graphic novel, not at all like Watchmen, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm pretty sure Alan Moore himself has said some good things about it as well.

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It is a great graphic novel, I read it a few years ago and that's what really turned me onto this medium

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@RealSlimCAvery

Maus is a corkingly well done piece of graphic storytelling. I have only read part I, as it happens. Must get the next part of the story.

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I have a copy of Maus, and yes it's quite good. Although his view of his dad kind of bugged me. Especially when it is his fathers story he's telling. Actually, recently I read an article where Moore slammed Spiegelman. I don't think he is a fan of his current work.

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"Heard them Walthers like to jump some" "As will you, with one in your elbow."

Interesting. I've seen him praise Maus specifically, but I didn't know he felt that way about him now. Do you have the article handy?

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That's a view of Spiegelman's treatment of Vladek that one can trace all the way back to Harvey Pekar in The Comics Journal of the 1980s. Pekar complained that Spiegelman represented the Vladek of WWII Poland as heroic and capable, and the Vladek of 1980s Rego Park as a pain in the ass; as I recall, Pekar suggested that Spiegelman did that to make his self-portrait more sympathetic.

It's a reading of Maus that I can understand to a point (especially since Pekar was writing his responses before Maus II was published, and so what he was familiar ended with the WWII Spiegelmans arriving at Auschwitz and the 1980s Art accusing his father of murder). But it's also a reading that I think has little understanding of the dynamics between first- and second-generation survivors. Speaking as someone whose father was in a WWII concentration camp (but in Indonesia), I found Maus an insightful and self-aware portrait of the profound ambivalence that children feel for their survivor parents. People emerge from concentration camps profoundly traumatized, and it correspondingly affects their future lives, including their relationships with their children. For Spiegelman to pretend that he didn't both admire and resent his father, or, at a milder level, that he didn't find his father inexpressibly exasperating at times, wouldn't be true to the relationship as I understand it.

As for Moore and Spiegelman - there's definitely ambivalence in that relationship, but also mutual respect. Spiegelman has said - but I couldn't tell you where - that Moore's subject in Watchmen - the superhero - is trivial, but that the preoccupation with structure and form is interesting. There's no doubt that Moore has correspondingly complicated responses to Spiegelman's work. But I wonder how recent that article is: I wonder if Little Lit is his target, or In the Shadow of No Towers, or Portrait of the Artist, some of which is already available if you know where to look.

It was a fairly recent quote from a scifi magazine called Death Ray. From this month I think. I haven't been able to find a site for it, however. Well there is one, but it doesn't really go into detail and doesn't seem up to date. Basically the magazine did a long interview with him, and in it he sounded off about his thoughts on the current comic industry, and some of the artists/writers. He went off on Frank Miller, being pretty dismissive of him as a writer. With Spiegelman, he comments were in regards to In The Shadow of No Towers, saying it was pathetic, to the point where it made him reevaluate his opinion of Maus, and of Spiegelman. He basically thinks his best work was probably in the 70's. I think he takes issue with some of these older comic book writers feeling they are repeating themselves and not trying to change the medium.



You're probably right. Still, there were times when I saw Spiegelman as a bit of a brat. He spends a portion of the story complaining that his father criticized him, and told him "he couldn't do anything as well as he could". I can't help but think, however, that that is true of most father son relationships. It certainly didn't seem as if his dad was a monster, or a terrible guy. Maybe I need to read it again. It's been a while.

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"Heard them Walthers like to jump some" "As will you, with one in your elbow."

Wasn't that the point, though? It's been a while for me, as well, but I thought Maus was really Spiegelman working through his relationship with his father through the telling of his stories of the concentration camps.

Either way, I can sympathize with him. My parents are a nightmare.

That was how I understood it, too, though it's been a few years since I last read the books.

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"Under no circumstances should anyone encourage the ordinary person to be funny."
--Bob Mackey

spiegelman is soooo much more than maus... although it is great, he's not some one hit wonder.

now, if i could only afford to buy some raw magazines i could make a decent arguement!!!

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The parts that I'm most impressed with Maus is the ones that portray his struggle to translate the story into the comic form. That includes his depression after Part 1 is published, as well as his discussion with his wife whether should she be drawn as a mouse or a frog.

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"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward."
- Søren Kierkegaard

Oh, I agree Spiegelman has done a lot of fine work.

I love all those guys who were working in underground comix in the '60s (though I am perhaps most partial to R. Crumb out of all of them--I have a vulgar sense of humor).

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"Under no circumstances should anyone encourage the ordinary person to be funny."
--Bob Mackey

Actually, you're in luck: there's a re-edition of Spiegelman's Breakdowns, with a new autobiographical preface, coming out in about two weeks (I think the specific date is October 8). It was published in translation in France last spring, so I've had a chance to read it. All the Breakdowns material is great - you can see the influence on Chris Ware, and you get a great sense of Spiegelman's range - and the new preface is brilliant, particularly at the end, when he starts applying some of the experiments from Breakdowns in the service of his narrative. When Moore reads it - if he hasn't already - he'll reassess his reassessment.

In any case, I'm sure Spiegelman won't lose any sleep over Moore's remarks. The Sage of Northampton is not always so sage. Shadow of No Towers isn't Maus, but it's better than Moore gives it credit for.

And in the second volume of Brunetti's Anthology of Graphic Fiction et cetera, there's a great Spiegelman piece from 1991. So it's a good couple of weeks for Spiegelman fans.

Amazing, amazing piece of work. I read both parts in one night a short while ago, but only now is the impact really hitting me. What a life, what a miraculous combination of wisdom, pragmatism, and sheer luck.

Was disappointed to see Vladek show such prejudice towards blacks near the end of the book, especially after building up my complete and total sympathy and respect, but it wasn't completely unexpected.

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I've been wanting to read this and luckily, it's on the syllabus for my Contemporary American Fiction class that I just began today.

Excited.

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Profs who put Maus on a Contemporary Fiction list should be beaten with (metaphorical) pipes. The work isn't fiction, postmodern or otherwise. It uses some fictional conventions, but Spiegelman himself had a quarrel with the NYTimes about their placing it on a fiction list; the editors subsequently moved it to the non-fiction list. It's a losing battle, because profs are so desperate to engage their students that they'll supplement the Franzen, Morrison, and Roth with a reputable comic book and spend twenty minutes finessing the issue of genre by bandying around the word "postmodernism."

mike_tyson, go read Marianne Hirsch, Andreas Huyssen, Dominick LaCapra, and Geoffrey Hartman on Maus, and then skip all your prof's lectures. Thomas Doherty and James Young are good too.

And Sally Jupiter, I find Vladek's anti-black racism troubling, too, but I think Spiegelman is making a major point about the limits of Vladek's insight, and also about the ease with which one can accept stereotypes about others while recognizing and resenting their limits when applied to oneself. Vladek had never met anyone of African descent until he reached America, so his racism is part of his Americanization. As it happens, Art Spiegelman's first idea for the cat-mouse allegory wasn't the Holocaust but anti-black violence in the States. He was going to write about the Ku Klux Kats.

I read Maus a couple years ago, i remember it being fantastic and quite a page turner. Would definitely make a great animated film.

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