Maus

I have always found World War II and the Holocaust very interesting topics to read. It is actually a bit of an obsession. So, when it was time to read Maus, I was really excited! I wanted to learn more about the Nazis, the concentration camps, and the war from a source that had been there. And in comic book form? That's brilliant!
The concept that cats are Nazis and mice are Jews is also very clever. That concept can be used to introduce the happenings in the Holocaust and the war to younger students. Even though I am reading a story where the characters are animals, I don't feel like they are. I can't say that I relate to them, because I have not lived through half of what they did, but I can sympathize with them, and that connection makes it easier for me to understand the purpose of the story. But, you can also take a step back, and if it becomes too much, just look at the characters, the illustrations. That's where showing this to a younger classroom can be wiser than introducing something as tragic as the Holocaust in say... a movie.
It started different than I expected. I really like that it shows Spiegelman writing and drawing the story of his father. The style of the drawings and the writing itself caught my attention immediately. The shapes are very clear and it is a lot of dark and light against each other. It is very simple, much like the concept of cat and mice against each other.
However, a few pages in, we meet Vladek, his father. It is a shame that he is such a hateful man because I really want to like him. There are small comments he makes here and there that throw me off. Especially when he speaks to or about Mala. How she “never does anything right” or if something spilled “she'd just leave it there.” It seems like she is just an inadequate replacement for Anja until he finally dies. The story switches from his interactions with his father while creating this comic book and Vladek's survival during the Holocaust. It is a nice relief from all the horrifying events occurring in the 1940s, but I wish their relationship was more likable.
For a while I thought this comic was meant to tell his father's story; his experiences fighting the Germans, getting caught, his life with his mother, the concentration camps. But towards the end, I think that it might be more about his mother. Throughout the story, he tries to get his dad to take a step back and tell the story chronologically, as if he didn't want to miss a single detail. In the beginning, he insists to know how he met his mother and what happened with this woman Lucia? A lot of the story, although from his father's point of view and his experiences, is about his mother and what she went through too. The panels of her suicide are very different from the rest of Maus. The fact that it contains human characters makes it even more daunting than the rest of the story.
Overall, it is an interesting comic book. There are elements that I love and cannot put down, like the experiences involving Germans and Jews and even the relationship he had with Anja. The things I did not like, though, cannot be changed because if they were the story wouldn't be real. And... if he were to change something to make it more appealing, how would you know he didn't change something else, like his father's time in the camps, to make it more or less horrifying?