I'm not sure if this article has been used yet, but I found it quit useful. The article speaks directly about Maus. It explains why the book is so good, and pretty much summarizes the whole book for you. The article further explains that the book or "comic" showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that comics could be just as biographical, as moving and as real as any book, and deal with issues that you wouldn’t expect to be addressed in the medium. It also explained how it showed that comics can be personal, can be revealing and can provide the author with a very real, visual and direct way of communicating with their audience.
That article also points out how the total lack of color within the pages seems to amplify the starkness of the story. There’s just something about the pure black and white color scheme that gives the story more gravity – and unlike another take on the story of the Holocaust, Spiegelman’s doesn’t use occasional splashes of red like Spielberg’s Schindler’s List would some years later.
The article explains how the animals are used as characters. Every now and again you’ll accidentally find yourself accrediting the horrible acts that you see on the page down to the fact that the characters are animals, before very quickly realizing that the events depicted in the pages of this book were simultaneously very human and very inhumane. It almost goes without saying, but the book deals with some truly horrific and ugly experiences in a no holds barred sort of way. It obviously tackles the Holocaust, but it also focuses down on more intimate, less well known moments – the disgust of Spiegelman’s father when Art stops to pick up a black hitch-hiker, and the author’s amazement that a man who was the victim of a racist regime could he himself discriminate against someone because of their race.
I really found this article helpful, so I hope it is for someone else too. I’m pretty sure I will use this as my lens in my essay. Here is the link to the article. http://www.onemetal.com/2010/04/26/must-read-maus/
