Maus

Hey guys, it's Adventure Van here with a book report on Maus. Maus is a book written by Art Spiegelman, who wrote down and recorded his conversations with his father, who lived thru the Holocaust. This is an interesting book due to it being about the Holocaust, a monstrous experience in which the Germans genocided an entire religious sect due to them being 'vermin', and yet the author decides to portray everyone inside anthropomorphically, drawing the Jews as literal mice, and the Germans as cats, alongside an assortment of other races being portrayed differently.

From what I've learnt about the holocaust, the hands on experiences of someone memorialized inside a deceptively done 'comic' book is quite encompassing of actual events. There's even some one-in-a-kind information, like how exactly the gas chambers worked due to his father being enlisted to take them apart before the Russians took a camp. And due to a lucky portion of his family being kept alive, the author was able to glean information about other camps and 'women's sectors'. And the author's father lived a very varied lifestyle in the camps, granting a lot of information from just one person's view.

The book was extremely well done to the point where it was able to make something very dehumanizing(literally drawing a human as something else) to become something very humanizing. Due to being unable to see the actual faces of the person, you refrain from making a racial stereotype about them yourself as there already is one, and instead you see the personality of the person themselves. But even with this, there's only so much a comic book can do, and despite the possible depths of the form, it still comes off a little too light in some sections.

It is most definitely a read that everyone should read, especially in this day and age.

Adventure Van, reading away.