Week 7 - Maus

This story came off as very genuine to me. It felt reminiscent of the film Big Fish or The Fall that both use the storytelling convention of having a character tell about things that happened in the past to another character. This type of story lends itself to a very episodic type of narrative. We experience this is Complete Maus several times as the son keeps coming back to hear more of his father's stories about the past. By doing this you as a reader want to keep reading so that you find out the full story. Also this lends itself to having nice breaks in the narrative but still be one big connected story.

I thought the father's dialogue was tricky to understand. It reminded almost of how Yoda talks in that after you read the dialogue you have to think about what you just read, decipher what it is he is trying to say.

I was also interested every time the author would want you to know what a specific item was in one of the frames he would specifically make a text box and say what that item is. An example is when Artie's father throws away Artie's coat and then Artie comes back with a new coat, different from the coat that Artie's father gave him. In the frame we see the wife putting the coat away in the closet with a text box indicating that it is a new trench coat. This text box also occurs another time when Artie is getting ready to leave and Artie's father's wife is playing a crossword puzzle from the new paper. We as a reader know it is a crossword puzzle because it says in a text box "x-word puzzle". I believe that Spiegelman used these text boxes because the frames in the comic were laid out are small, not allowing the use for finer details. Oftentimes I would even have trouble keeping track of which character was which since the majority of the time they all look similar. Except when they introduce different animals or when you pay specific attention to what clothing they had. I also believe that being black and white worked against Spiegelman because with the use of color he could have easily differentiated what was what.

When we get to the part near the end where we see some of Artie's comic work I think the way that this is conveyed in genius. The entire time Artie is interviewing his father and I am thinking as a reader what kind of comics does Artie make. Then near the end we actually get to read one of Artie's comics in a comic inside of a comic type way. I think the way that this was done was really great because it really puts you in Artie's world being able to see the type of content he creates. He created this very twisted underground comic about his mother dying showing that how upset it made him.

At one point near the end Artie shows his father rough sketches of the comic book he is working on. He says "It's an important book. People who don't usually read such stories will be interested.". When he says this I feel as though this is the reason that the Maus is so important. It addresses a topic that might not have been discussed in such detail in 1980 when it was originally published. This in a way feels almost like it's a PSA in that it is raising awareness of what the times were like back then in the war for a family such as Artie's father.