Unique Style of Maus

Art Spiegelman's real name was Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman. He changed his name to Arthur Isadore upon coming to the USA. He later changed it to Art.

He is a Polish Jew and the son of a Holocaust-surviving family. He began working on cartoons in the 60s. He imitated the styles of his favorite comics such as Mad. Continued to work in several comics and fanzines such as Smudge and Squire. He was earning money from his drawings by the time he attended high school. He was believing that art is for expression so he turned down many commercial offers. He studied art and philosophy at the university. He worked at a college newspaper as a cartoonist for a humor magazine. He later began drawing sketches for trading cards.

His style and ideas were mostly influenced by Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner, and Franz Kafka. He was suffering from Lazy Eye so he lacked depth perception and it can be seen in his style. His works are simple with dense motifs. He is concerned with form.

Maus tells the true story of Art Spiegelman’s father’s, Vladek Spiegelman’s, experiences during World War II. It consists of two books Book One - My Father Bleeds History and Book Two - And Here My Troubles Began. Spiegelman uses the frame narrative technique to show how he struggles as a child of a holocaust survivor. He also shows his struggles to get information from his father about the Holocaust.

(Cat heads were used for German soldiers.)

The most unique aspect of the comic series is the usage of different animal heads for different races. Spiegelman understands that narrating his father’s experience of the Holocaust is an enormous responsibility, and he struggles with the pressures of that responsibility. The visual metaphor that defines Maus — Artie’s use of animal heads in place of human faces, with a different animal representing each nationality or ethnic group — provides Artie with a platform for investigating his anxieties about his project, acknowledging Artie’s distance from the events of his father’s story while simultaneously binding him to the people about whom he writes.

Artie has never met many of the people from Vladek’s life and lacks sufficient information to create accurate representations of many of the scenes he describes. Artie does not know, for example, what his paternal grandfather or aunts looked like since there are no surviving photographs of them. He struggles to imagine the layout of the tin shop where Vladek worked during his time in Auschwitz, and Vladek often draws Artie diagrams when trying to explain the layout of a bunker or a concentration camp. All these gaps in his knowledge highlight the limitations of Artie’s imagination and experience. At the same time, Artie’s mouse head creates an undeniable connection between him and all other Jewish people. 

(Pig heads used for Polish people)

Artie shares his rodent features with his parents and other relatives; with the friends and neighbors in Europe who endured the war alongside them; with Jews, he meets in his day-to-day life; and with the hordes of nameless dead, he depicts standing in line in the ghettos, struggling for breath in overcrowded cattle cars, and dying in torment in the gas chambers and mass graves of Auschwitz. In drawing them all with the same mouse head, Artie unites the identities and experiences of all Jewish people, tying them together across continents and generations. Artie cannot relate to the horror of the Holocaust in the same intimate way Vladek can, but he has been shaped by those events. He is the inheritor of a tremendous intergenerational legacy shared by all Jewish people.