This comic was definitely something I would suggest to read. After reading it I feel I can understand the Holocaust in a different way I guess you could say. Like many people would say, we have learned so much about the Holocaust that we feel we already know so much about it. But the thing is not many of us have heard about the Holocaust from people who lived through it and survived. I've seen movies and read books about it in school, studied it in history, and there have even been video games and of course comics that have been built around the subject. So many different ways to learn about the subject, but this was definitely a more digestible way to hear about it.
Maus was very descriptive in ways such as its maps of the concentration camps and the death chambers. It almost made you feel scared in a way to where you were seeing the real thing almost. And the images of the mice being hung were just disgusting to me. I really felt my heart break a bit. That is another thing that was really done well, the way they used cats and mice for the characters. It almost showed how this whole ordeal was very animalistic and barbaric. The cats rounding up the mice and killing them all together. It was something you would expect from something like a real cat and mouse, but even they aren't that brutal and soulless.
To think of and even hear this horrible story from the father was very discerning. He went through so much that I really can't blame him for being as anger as he was in this story. He went through this whole ordeal and survived, but then had to deal with his wife committing suicide and having to raise his son. I feel that if I went through something like this and all the heartbreak I wouldn't be able to survive, but he kept pushing on and didn't let anyone or anything get in his way of living his life.
I really enjoyed the style of the drawings. They were rough and sketchy, but in a way I felt that it was on purpose to get a stringer message across. In motion design we chose different mediums to get a certain message across, whether it be stop motion, traditional animation, or computer animation. So understanding that, I feel Art Spiegelman drew in this way to bring his father's message across stronger. Overall, a very powerful story and graphic novel. I definitely think I'll be reading it again to just let it sink in even more.
