Maus

I’m applying this week’s reading to the first hardback edition (1986) of Art Spiegelman’s Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale, the only graphic novel/memoir to win a Pulitzer Prize. The volume relies largely on phanopoeia, logopoei, and radial readings. The comics themselves are hand-lettered, while the chapter headings use bold machined fonts (akin to Arial or Franklin Gothic) paired with hand-drawn illustrations that harken back to war-era advertisements, propaganda posters, and even to period films. This is where the radial reading is most apt. The use of cats and mice is also apt in a radial reading; the anthropomorphic figures seem to reference Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney, and Tom & Jerry. This renders the inhumanity of man into both literal and figurative cartoon and does so by relying on the reader’s knowledge of early twentieth-century history and pop culture.

The visual reading additionally relies on the reader’s knowledge of classic comic books and their layout, occasionally breaking the classic text box/text bubble configuration for larger maps and illustrations. In fact, the back cover of this edition features a color map of occupied Poland with mouse skull and crossbones used to indicate the location of concentration camps. Two mice in black and white (ostensibly father and son) are superimposed in the lower left, posed in the comfort of an armchair (father) or stretched out on imagined carpet below (son). To their right, an inset map shows the characters’ home in Rego, Park, NY, signaling the threat of the larger/looming map somewhat moot (into a distant place if not a distant time).

What renders these images even more interesting is the text box below, a section filled with review blurbs. The book, as it is described on its own back cover, is (according to the Washington Post) “impossible to describe accurately, and impossible to achieve in any medium but comics.” According to Newsweek, “the very artificiality of its surface makes it possible to imagine the reality beneath.” (!)

The hardback covers and the pages within are glossy, foregoing the flat and cheap paper usually used for comic books and signaling the difference between comic memoir and comic strip, even while using the visual language of the latter. The copyright page is headed by a quote from Adolf Hitler, followed by a two-page title page—the front papers are designed to look like a billboard or wall that’s been spray painted with graffiti (a clean and rather thick banner listing Pantheon as the publisher runs across the bottom). The endpapers feature a full-page graphic illustration (possibly a linocut) depicting a crowd of grim mice with stars affixed to their clothing. A text box advertising the book’s sequel appears slightly below center to disrupt this image. In many ways, this book calls attention to itself as a commercial object.