This week I read Art Spielgelman's Maus 1&2. I remember always seeing this book in the bookstore when I bought my Dark Horse Star Wars comics, and being intrigued by the cover, but figuring that the content was a little too mature for my preteen age. It was less the violent and dark themes that wouldn't mesh well with my young age, and more the fact that I would not have appreciated how much gravitas the entire story holds. I really enjoyed how the story was told using the animals as representations of the different races of people as well as how it was a story told by Art's father.

Despite the fact that I am part Jewish, I really don't know a huge amount about the holocaust, but what I know, I learned from a huge book on world war 2 that had photos of concentration camps. Maus gave me what seemed like a very accurate representation of exactly what it was like from beginning to end. I remember a Holocaust survivor visited my high school and the story he told us was incredibly similar to the storyline of Maus. The use of animals made the story a lot easier to take in, and was very helpful to easily distinguish the Jews(mice) from my Germans (cats).

The story worked very well using the graphic novel as the method of conveyance, because the pace was changed based on the density of the text combined with the detail of the drawings. Traditional writing would not have given the story justice, mostly because of how much Vladek's story is image based, told as a story, Maus is how he is imagining it in the moment.