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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4zevRqMUhU

"My Mother would let me know things but in spurts that were absolutely terrifying and not with any context" -Art Spiegelman

- This is what made Art so curious to learn what his parents encountered.
- Art talked about his experiences with his parents from a n young age that led up to him constructing Maus and learning what his family went through.

Rachel

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Holocaust Graphic Novelist Art Spiegelman on "Maus" & Wave of Book Bans Sweeping U.S.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/books/review/the-making-of-maus.html

https://www.colorado.edu/honorsjournal/2018/11/07/maus-art-spiegleman-graphic-novel-shows-power-memoir

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4zevRqMUhU

Rachel

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"Survival is having children even if they hate you," Art Spiegelman wrote in his notebook in 1985, while still working on his two-volume comics masterpiece, "Maus," which would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize. Subtitled "A Survivor's Tale," "Maus" recreated the horrors of the Holocaust - as experienced by Art's father, Vladek, and mother, Anja - casting Jews as mice and Germans as cats. But it also explored the difficult relationship between tetchy skinflint Vladek and his resentful son with touching and discomfiting honesty.

The richly rewarding 25th-anniversary volume METAMAUS (Pantheon, $35) reveals just how history has repeated itself for Art Spiegelman. Vladek survived the Holocaust only to have a son with whom he never truly made peace: "My anger against him was so free-floating and easy to access," Spiegelman explains, that "it was just our leitmotif." Art survived Vladek but still struggles to come to terms with the legacy of his own creation. "The success of 'Maus' called my bluff," he says ruefully. "O.K., O.K.! So you're a genius! So now what?!" In the aftermath of his book's success, he admits, he has mostly been "trying to wriggle out from under my own achievement."

"MetaMaus" consists primarily of an expansive, fascinating interview with Spiegelman conducted by Hillary Chute, a scholar of contemporary comics who teaches at the University of Chicago. The beautifully designed hardcover also includes abundant archival material, conversations with Spiegelman's wife (Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker's art editor) and children, and transcripts of his original sessions with Vladek. (For the true completist, an accompanying DVD offers audio recordings of those interviews, together with reproductions of Spiegelman's notebooks, over 7,000 additional drawings, insightful essays by Chute and Lawrence Weschler, and an annotated electronic copy of the complete "Maus.")

Image

Credit... Illustration from "MetaMaus"

Exhaustive? Sure. But few works of literature published in the past quarter-century bear scrutiny and analysis as well as "Maus," a complicated, thorny book that became a landmark simultaneously in the disparate worlds of memoir, comics and Holocaust history. Not that you'll find Spiegelman spending much time considering his book's place in the literary canon; he and Chute, thankfully, concentrate mostly on the book's long gestation, beginning in the early 1970s with a three-page comic Spiegelman drew for a San Francisco underground-comix book and ending with the publication of "Maus II," in 1991. (The 25th anniversary is dated to the first volume's publication in book form, in 1986.)

Spiegelman recalls the struggles of researching "Maus" at a time before scholarship was widely available to a mass audience. Pre-Internet, he depended on his parents' collection of pamphlets written and drawn by survivors, and on research visits to Poland. On his second trip to Birkenau, in 1987, Spiegelman was baffled to find a perfectly preserved barracks where once there had been only rubble; it turned out to be a re-creation built for a Holocaust movie, left standing by Polish authorities because it looked accurate. He admits he was jealous of the moviemakers' unlimited resources, when "every scrap of information I needed for 'Maus' was so hard-won." Later, just selling the book to publishers was a challenge; "MetaMaus" reprints a revealing collection of rejection letters that will surely pain their authors, some of whom still work in publishing today.

When the book came out, of course, it was a rousing success - critically and commercially - although Spiegelman also remembers the responses that were less than understanding, at home and abroad. "Don't you think that a comic book about Auschwitz is in bad taste?" one angry reporter asked him when the book was published in Germany. "No," Spiegelman replied, "I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste."

"MetaMaus" is full of such unexpected details, many of them quite touching. I was overwhelmed by a simple Spiegelman family tree, packed with 85 Old World names. On the next two pages, the same genealogy is displayed as it existed immediately after World War II; it contains 13 names and 72 empty spaces. (Among the lost: Art's "phantom brother," Richieu, who died in 1943, four years before Art was born.)

This book also serves as a master class on the making and reading of comics, highlighted by Spiegelman's close analyses of dozens of important points in the text. Especially instructive are his observations about the story's bittersweet final page - a happy ending that isn't truly happy, made of six perfectly paced panels, a tombstone and a signature. The last frame encapsulates in one simple moment the artfulness behind the tale we've just read, and the uneasy combination of filial pride and anger that flowed through "Maus" and flows through "MetaMaus" as well. "I'm tired from talking, Richieu," the elderly Vladek Spiegelman says to his son Art, turning over in his bed, "and it's enough stories for now."

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"Survival is having children even if they hate you," Art Spiegelman wrote in his notebook in 1985, while still working on his two-volume comics masterpiece, "Maus," which would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize. Subtitled "A Survivor's Tale," "Maus" recreated the horrors of the Holocaust - as experienced by Art's father, Vladek, and mother, Anja - casting Jews as mice and Germans as cats.

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Why did Art put a map of Auschwitz in the background of his panels when interviewing his father?
When Art walked around the site he reconciled these passed conversations and thoughts with his father.

Deven

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No, not all of Maus was contributed through imagination. Of course, Art was not directly there to experiences the Holocaust, so, he used his imagination to fill in the details he was not sure of. He is a smart man who uses creativity to paint a picture of what he believed occurred.

Rachel

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HOW and WHY Vol. ll of Maus weighs and investigates so many different types of historical evidence

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HOW and WHY Vol. ll of Maus weighs and investigates so many different types of historical evidence

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Maus Vol. ll tells a story of survival through a boys thoughts and his fathers experiences that Art was told.

HOW? Art got his research through personal stories told from his father to persuade and inform the audience of what happened to individuals during the Holocaust. He also found pamphlets from his parents which he took direct evidence and quotes from. Art also visited the Holocaust camp site in Poland to do research for his work. He personally got to see a remade barrack for a Holocaust movie. He personally stated that he wish that had more information for his writing just as other Holocaust documentaries had. He also made sure to use vivid and explicit images and words to really describe to the audience how brutal and distinctive these hard times were for the average, and innocent human.

The Making of Maus, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/books/review/the-making-of-maus.html

Deven

WHY? Art weighs and investigates so many different types of historical evidence because he had so many different sources of information that allowed him to broaden his wording and this enabled him to tell a more in detail story. He did this to record his fathers experiences while he was in the Holocaust. He also wrote Maus to show to the world his experiences of being the son of a Holocaust survivor and that the trauma and pain never goes away even if it did not happen to you, personally. This is what allowed such a strong and evident plot, character representation, true and historical events, and such disturbing images. The traumatic events that happened to Vledek and his wife, allowed Art to come up with the perfect survival tale.

Rachel

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Survival is having children even if they hate you," Art Spiegelman wrote in his notebook in 1985, while still working on his two-volume comics masterpiece, "Maus," which would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize. Subtitled "A Survivor's Tale," "Maus" recreated the horrors of the Holocaust - as experienced by Art's father, Vladek, and mother, Anja - casting Jews as mice and Germans as cats. But it also explored the difficult relationship between tetchy skinflint Vladek and his resentful son with touching and discomfiting honesty.

The richly rewarding 25th-anniversary volume METAMAUS (Pantheon, $35) reveals just how history has repeated itself for Art Spiegelman. Vladek survived the Holocaust only to have a son with whom he never truly made peace: "My anger against him was so free-floating and easy to access," Spiegelman explains, that "it was just our leitmotif." Art survived Vladek but still struggles to come to terms with the legacy of his own creation. "The success of 'Maus' called my bluff," he says ruefully. "O.K., O.K.! So you're a genius! So now what?!" In the aftermath of his book's success, he admits, he has mostly been "trying to wriggle out from under my own achievement."

"MetaMaus" consists primarily of an expansive, fascinating interview with Spiegelman conducted by Hillary Chute, a scholar of contemporary comics who teaches at the University of Chicago. The beautifully designed hardcover also includes abundant archival material, conversations with Spiegelman's wife (Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker's art editor) and children, and transcripts of his original sessions with Vladek. (For the true completist, an accompanying DVD offers audio recordings of those interviews, together with reproductions of Spiegelman's notebooks, over 7,000 additional drawings, insightful essays by Chute and Lawrence Weschler, and an annotated electronic copy of the complete "Maus.")

Image

Credit... Illustration from "MetaMaus"

Exhaustive? Sure. But few works of literature published in the past quarter-century bear scrutiny and analysis as well as "Maus," a complicated, thorny book that became a landmark simultaneously in the disparate worlds of memoir, comics and Holocaust history. Not that you'll find Spiegelman spending much time considering his book's place in the literary canon; he and Chute, thankfully, concentrate mostly on the book's long gestation, beginning in the early 1970s with a three-page comic Spiegelman drew for a San Francisco underground-comix book and ending with the publication of "Maus II," in 1991. (The 25th anniversary is dated to the first volume's publication in book form, in 1986.)

Spiegelman recalls the struggles of researching "Maus" at a time before scholarship was widely available to a mass audience. Pre-Internet, he depended on his parents' collection of pamphlets written and drawn by survivors, and on research visits to Poland. On his second trip to Birkenau, in 1987, Spiegelman was baffled to find a perfectly preserved barracks where once there had been only rubble; it turned out to be a re-creation built for a Holocaust movie, left standing by Polish authorities because it looked accurate. He admits he was jealous of the moviemakers' unlimited resources, when "every scrap of information I needed for 'Maus' was so hard-won." Later, just selling the book to publishers was a challenge; "MetaMaus" reprints a revealing collection of rejection letters that will surely pain their authors, some of whom still work in publishing today.

When the book came out, of course, it was a rousing success - critically and commercially - although Spiegelman also remembers the responses that were less than understanding, at home and abroad. "Don't you think that a comic book about Auschwitz is in bad taste?" one angry reporter asked him when the book was published in Germany. "No," Spiegelman replied, "I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste."

"MetaMaus" is full of such unexpected details, many of them quite touching. I was overwhelmed by a simple Spiegelman family tree, packed with 85 Old World names. On the next two pages, the same genealogy is displayed as it existed immediately after World War II; it contains 13 names and 72 empty spaces. (Among the lost: Art's "phantom brother," Richieu, who died in 1943, four years before Art was born.)

This book also serves as a master class on the making and reading of comics, highlighted by Spiegelman's close analyses of dozens of important points in the text. Especially instructive are his observations about the story's bittersweet final page - a happy ending that isn't truly happy, made of six perfectly paced panels, a tombstone and a signature. The last frame encapsulates in one simple moment the artfulness behind the tale we've just read, and the uneasy combination of filial pride and anger that flowed through "Maus" and flows through "MetaMaus" as well. "I'm tired from talking, Richieu," the elderly Vladek Spiegelman says to his son Art, turning over in his bed, "and it's enough stories for now."

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"Survival is having children even if they hate you," Art Spiegelman wrote in his notebook in 1985, while still working on his two-volume comics masterpiece, "Maus," which would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize. Subtitled "A Survivor's Tale," "Maus" recreated the horrors of the Holocaust - as experienced by Art's father, Vladek, and mother, Anja - casting Jews as mice and Germans as cats.

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- The reader sees which questions Art got to ask his father- Very heavy shading to show sadness and filth- The reader gets to see the scenery behind Vledek's 

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Deven

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On page 14, Art describes his personal experience gathering information from his father. His Father was not cooperating. 

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Deven

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- uses plot
- characters
- dialogue
- tells a consistent story

Deven

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HE IS TRYING TO BALANCE HIS ROUGH RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS FATHER, AND THE TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES OF HIS FATHER AND MOTHER DURING THE HOLOCAUST

Rachel

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- tells us about real events that occurred during the Holocaust