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I'm reading Maus: My Father Bleeds History and its continuation, And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman. They're actually the "text" for one of my classes this semester.

They're graphic novels about the author's father and his experiences during the Holocaust. In it, all the characters are drawn as human-like animals: Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, etc.

I'm surprised at how much I like the art in it. I usually read manga if I'm reading a graphic novel, so the style is very different.

I don't, however, feel that the animal depictions add anything to the novel. It's a story about people, and whether or not the people look like human seems superficial to it all. Maybe this is because I read a lot of fiction and semi-fiction about the Holocaust - I'm used to engaging it this way, but maybe others need the separation from their own forms to do it. Any thoughts?

Anyone else read them? I apologize for not immediately engaging you in discussion if you do respond! I don't want to check back until I've finished the second volume, to avoid spoilers. smile

I've read them; I own both of them, in fact, and they're among my favorite graphic novels of all time! When I had to pick my small box of books to bring with me to college, I made sure that Maus was in there...

I absolutely love how they seem to tell two stories at the same time, and while the story of Vladek getting through the concentration camps and escape is pretty much the whole point of the thing, it's still very interesting to see how it is also a sort of autobiography of the artist/author and his relationship with his father.

My thoughts on the whole animal form idea...While you're right, at times it doesn't seem very important at all, but I think that at various points it's very important. For example, remember the part in the concentration camps, where the guy is pleading with the guards, saying something like, "I'm not a Jew, I'm really a German!", and you see the same frame twice over, once with the guy as a mouse, and the second time with him as a cat, and that makes it a powerful scene. Or where they are trying to disguise themselves as Poles, and they have pig masks? Or where the artist is trying to decide whether to portray his wife as a mouse or as a frog? All these points really make you stop and think about how different real life is from this book, where it is easy to tell at a glance, who is German or Jew, or who is enemy or friend...It makes you think about how could they tell who was who, and makes you also wonder at how many mistakes could've been made, because real life isn't really that easy.
Sure, at first you say that it seems "superficial", but in the end, when you've suffered with these mice, when you've seen them in such horrible positions, and seen them dead and dying, I don't feel that it seems very superficial at all, by the end.