Maus
Maus is a very moving. It takes the medium of comics to a whole new level, with its very personal storytelling and narrative. I think the best part about how this biography, is how it is structured. The dialogue is very believable and feel like real people naturally talking to each other. I also found it very interesting that the author included the moments of conversations between himself and his father. Going into this book, I thought that it was just going to be completely involved in a personal story of the holocaust. I didn't expect it to also show the real life aspect of what was happening in the present (at the time it was written).
Up until now, all the comics we had read have been very character and plot driven. This comic however, very much showed the author's connection to underground comics. Halfway through volume one, we are shown an underground comic that he made about his mom's suicide and how it affected himself and his father. It was very personal and honest, and emanates the nature of what underground comics are. This same feeling is amplified and very apparent throughout all of Maus.
Telling this kind of story in a comic book format was very smart, and made it felt like it was easier to visualize the events as something that actually happened, because of the illustrations accompanying the words. The depiction of people as animals also contributed a lot to making this work more accessible to a wider audience.
One thing I found interesting about the layout of this comic between the first and second volumes, is that the formatting shifts a little at the beginning of the first volume. The first volume has a very organic kind of feel. The lines of the panels are wobbly, there's a lot of panels that aren't boxed in, and the text is smaller and more together. At the beginning of the second book however, everything is suddenly all in boxes that have tight lines, and text that is bigger and thinner. It looses the organic feel of the first one. Even more interesting though, as soon as the book moves on from the phase of talking about how Mala left, the art and text goes back to the same style as the first book! It makes me think that maybe the meat of the book (the parts about the holocaust) were illustrated at around a similar time as the first book, and the beginning of the second book was illustrated later. Another theory for this change though, is that maybe Arty wanted to create a visual disconnect between the "current day" narrative, and the "history" narrative.
Up until now, all the comics we had read have been very character and plot driven. This comic however, very much showed the author's connection to underground comics. Halfway through volume one, we are shown an underground comic that he made about his mom's suicide and how it affected himself and his father. It was very personal and honest, and emanates the nature of what underground comics are. This same feeling is amplified and very apparent throughout all of Maus.
Telling this kind of story in a comic book format was very smart, and made it felt like it was easier to visualize the events as something that actually happened, because of the illustrations accompanying the words. The depiction of people as animals also contributed a lot to making this work more accessible to a wider audience.
One thing I found interesting about the layout of this comic between the first and second volumes, is that the formatting shifts a little at the beginning of the first volume. The first volume has a very organic kind of feel. The lines of the panels are wobbly, there's a lot of panels that aren't boxed in, and the text is smaller and more together. At the beginning of the second book however, everything is suddenly all in boxes that have tight lines, and text that is bigger and thinner. It looses the organic feel of the first one. Even more interesting though, as soon as the book moves on from the phase of talking about how Mala left, the art and text goes back to the same style as the first book! It makes me think that maybe the meat of the book (the parts about the holocaust) were illustrated at around a similar time as the first book, and the beginning of the second book was illustrated later. Another theory for this change though, is that maybe Arty wanted to create a visual disconnect between the "current day" narrative, and the "history" narrative.
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