Legitimation of the Comics

The graphic novel Maus is the story of Art Spiegelman's father, Vladek telling Art about his experience as a polish jew living in Nazi occupied Poland and then how he lived and survived in a concentration camp. It uses animals to depict the different races of people like Jews are represented as mice, Americans are represented as dogs and Germans are shown as cats. I feel he uses this so the readers can easily associate groups with each other and differentiate them at the same time. Even though each group is represented by animals they dont have those animal characteristics like even though Polish people were shown as pigs it wasn't to be interpreted as an insult.

Something very interesting that Art depicted in Maus was how his father acted and his attitudes towards other people and races. Art does not make it seem like his father was some sort of perfectly tolerant, kind and welcoming man. He makes it show that his father has faults and his own inherent prejudices, in the novel Art, his wife and his father are driving and they pull over to give a black hitchhiker a ride into town. His dad is not happy about this at all and starts to mutter racist comments in yiddish under his breath while Art and his wife have polite conversation with the man, as he gets out Vladek yells at them for letting a black man into the car. Art's wife asks how after all Vladek has been through he can say such things but he laughs at the comparison of blacks to Jews. It is shown that Vladek is very miserly, overbearing with Art and very stuck up when it comes to things Art does. But I don't think Art was trying to slander his father, I feel its just his way of saying that his father is a person with faults but also good qualities.

 This story to me this personal account is memorable due to the fact that instead of just telling the father's story we get to know him as he was then and is now. His personal relationships with his family and we get to know his family as well, how they feel about his and what they are like. With most stories dealing with that you only get what happened in a certain time frame, while that is important as a reader I am always curious of the question "then what". What does he do, how does he cope, how does he rebuild and in Maus you get those answers, you find out his first wife killed herself, you find out he got re-married, and you find out what became of him after those terrible events.