Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,0, University of Tubingen (Philosophische Fakultät), course: Popular Culture, language: English, abstract: Representing the Holocaust in a comic book is a daring enterprise; doing it with animal figures is even bolder. Spiegelman's work Maus braves many conventions of dealing with the Holocaust but reconstructs it in an unprecedented and unique manner. By exceeding literary boundaries and generic expectations, it is thus an essential addition to Holocaust literature. [...] This paper analyzes the animal metaphor in Spiegelman's Maus. It examines and discusses the different spheres in which the functions of the animal metaphor become evident. First, this paper traces back to the origins of using animals in literature. After a brief historical introduction of the sources and the development of animal figures, chapter 2 explains their literary function and their significance in comic books. Chapter 3 delivers a brief overview of Maus. It includes a synopsis of the comic's plot as well as a summary of its reception. Chapter 4, the main part of this paper, investigates the various functions and receptions of the animal metaphor in Maus from different perspectives. In chapter 4.1, Spiegelman's personal explanations reveal how Maus's animal characters function for him as a second generation witness. Chapter 4.2 focuses upon these implications brought into play with the use of the mask. A further subject, discussed in chapter 4.3, is how the animal imagery serves as a distancing and defamiliarizing device in order to deal with the horror of the Holocaust. Chapter 4.4 discusses the interconnection between both features. In chapter 4.5, the examination tries further to comprehend how the animal metaphor contributes to the reconstruction of ethnicity and identity in Maus. Since any analysis of a comic book must not neglect its visual dimension, chapter 4.6 considers Maus's drawing style and the significance of its visual representation. Maus has attracted many critics and its reception has been diverse and manifold. Target of the criticism has been especially the use of animals as substitutes for human beings. Chapter 4.7 examines and discusses Maus's animal device from a critical point of view regarding its incongruities and problems brought into play with the association of human beings and animals. The last chapter summarizes the insights of the analysis and discusses in what way Maus's animal metaphor strikes a new path in the conception and reconstruction of the Holocaust.

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale and Maus II - the complete story of Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, living and surviving in Hitler's Europe. By addressing the horror of the Holocaust through cartoons, the author captures the everyday reality of fear and is able to explore the guilt, relief and extraordinary sensation of survival - and how the children of survivors are in their own way affected by the trials of their parents. A contemporary classic of immeasurable significance.

Winner of the National Book Award The Painted Bird is one of the most shocking indictments of Nazi madness and terrors of the Holocaust during World War II. It is a story about the proximity of terror and savagery to innocence and love. It is a vivid and graphic portrayal of the hellish Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe as seen through the eyes of a boy struggling for survival, an alien child lost in a world gone mad.

NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER • Visually and emotionally rich, MetaMaus is as groundbreaking as the masterpiece whose creation it reveals. In the pages of MetaMaus, Art Spiegelman re-enters the Pulitzer prize–winning Maus, the modern classic that has altered how we see literature, comics, and the Holocaust ever since it was first published twenty-five years ago. He probes the questions that Maus most often evokes—Why the Holocaust? Why mice? Why comics?—and gives us a new and essential work about the creative process. Compelling and intimate, MetaMaus is poised to become a classic in its own right.

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,0, University of Tubingen (Philosophische Fakultat), course: Popular Culture, language: English, abstract: Representing the Holocaust in a comic book is a daring enterprise; doing it with animal figures is even bolder. Spiegelman's work Maus braves many conventions of dealing with the Holocaust but reconstructs it in an unprecedented and unique manner. By exceeding literary boundaries and generic expectations, it is thus an essential addition to Holocaust literature. [...] This paper analyzes the animal metaphor in Spiegelman's Maus. It examines and discusses the different spheres in which the functions of the animal metaphor become evident. First, this paper traces back to the origins of using animals in literature. After a brief historical introduction of the sources and the development of animal figures, chapter 2 explains their literary function and their significance in comic books. Chapter 3 delivers a brief overview of Maus. It includes a synopsis of the comic's plot as well as a summary of its reception. Chapter 4, the main part of this paper, investigates the various functions and receptions of the animal metaphor in Maus from different perspectives. In chapter 4.1, Spiegelman's personal explanations reveal how Maus's animal characters function for him as a second generation witness. Chapter 4.2 focuses upon these implications brought into play with the use of the mask. A further subject, discussed in chapter 4.3, is how the animal imagery serves as a distancing and defamiliarizing device in order to deal with the horror of the Holocaust. Chapter 4.4 discusses the interconnection between both features. In chapter 4.5, the examination tries further to comprehend how the animal metaphor contributes to the reconstruction of ethnicity and identity in Maus. Since any analysis of a comic book must not neglect its visual dimension, chapter 4.6 considers Maus's drawing style and t"

Whether one describes them as sequential art, graphic narratives or graphic novels, comics have become a vital part of contemporary culture. Their range of expression contains a tremendous variety of forms, genres and modes − from high to low, from serial entertainment for children to complex works of art. This has led to a growing interest in comics as a field of scholarly analysis, as comics studies has established itself as a major branch of criticism. This handbook combines a systematic survey of theories and concepts developed in the field alongside an overview of the most important contexts and themes and a wealth of close readings of seminal works and authors. It will prove to be an indispensable handbook for a large readership, ranging from researchers and instructors to students and anyone else with a general interest in this fascinating medium.

On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of its first publication, here is the definitive edition of the book acclaimed as "the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust" (Wall Street Journal) and "the first masterpiece in comic book history" (The New Yorker). The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in "drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust" (The New York Times). Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century's grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.

Interviews with the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Maus: A Survivor's Tale

Contributions by David M. Ball, Ian Gordon, Andrew Loman, Andrea A. Lunsford, James Lyons, Ana Merino, Graham J. Murphy, Chris Murray, Adam Rosenblatt, Julia Round, Joe Sutliff Sanders, Stephen Weiner, and Paul Williams Starting in the mid-1980s, a talented set of comics artists changed the American comic book industry forever by introducing adult sensibilities and aesthetic considerations into popular genres such as superhero comics and the newspaper strip. Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1987) revolutionized the former genre in particular. During this same period, underground and alternative genres began to garner critical acclaim and media attention beyond comics-specific outlets, as best represented by Art Spiegelman's Maus. Publishers began to collect, bind, and market comics as “graphic novels,” and these appeared in mainstream bookstores and in magazine reviews. The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts brings together new scholarship surveying the production, distribution, and reception of American comics from this pivotal decade to the present. The collection specifically explores the figure of the comics creator—either as writer, as artist, or as writer and artist—in contemporary US comics, using creators as focal points to evaluate changes to the industry, its aesthetics, and its critical reception. The book also includes essays on landmark creators such as Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware, as well as insightful interviews with Jeff Smith (Bone), Jim Woodring (Frank) and Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics). As comics have reached new audiences, through different material and electronic forms, the public's broad perception of what comics are has changed. The Rise of the American Comics Artist surveys the ways in which the figure of the creator has been at the heart of these evolutions.

A beautifully designed introduction to art history by way of artworks that feature the mouse—from the ancient world to drawings by Picasso, Disney, and Art Spiegelman. Across centuries and civilizations, artists have used the mouse—the planet’s most common mammal after us—to illustrate our myths and beliefs. Mice have appeared as Japanese symbols of good luck or medieval emblems of evil, in Arab fables, Russian political satire and Nazi propaganda, as scientific tools and to help us challenge the way we see nature. With more than 80 rarely reproduced works—including paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Gustav Klimt, a silkscreen by Andy Warhol, a print by Hokusai, a photograph by André Kertész, a sculpture by Claes Oldenburg, a video installation by Bruce Nauman, a performance by Joseph Beuys, and many more—Lorna Owen has created an engaging presentation of an extraordinary range. The pieces, which represent every period of visual art, are accompanied by Owen’s intriguing text about the story behind each work. She has combined her passion for art and her empathy for the unsung archetype of the animal kingdom to explain not only how or why the artist came to use the mouse as a subject, but how the art, in the end, reveals more about us than it could ever reveal about this humble creature.