'Form meets Content'

      As kids, me and my brother read comics together all the time. From the age of five I was reading and understanding them by myself without difficulty. But as my brother grew up he stopped reading them, and so did I. I mean who reads comics in high school? No one. That is until I was assigned Maus to read. But just five pages in I could tell it was so much more than just a comic book. It's a novel that gives new meaning to the term 'form meets content.' Spiegelman explores abstract ways of conveying meaning and dances on the line between visual and verbal art to give life to his Fathers' story. Each page of this comic is filled to the edges with literary devices as well as visual symbols that work together to tell the story. However my favorite of these pages is page 84 (shown below).

                                                                

     In just this one page Spiegelman incorporates multiple motifs. The first one is the stripes shown on the wallpaper in the background. These stripes most likely are meant to represent the stripes worn by the Jewish prisoners in the concentration camp. These are shown in background of the boxes where Vladek is telling Artie about how these events still make him sad. Spiegelman is using the visual of the stripes looming over Vladek to further demonstrate that these memories will never go away. The other motif shown on this page is that of the smoke. In the box in which Vladek is asking Artie not to smoke, the smoke rises from the bottom of the box to the top, separating the two men. In this visual alone it is clear that the smoke bothers Vladek and forms a barrier between him and his son. It can also be inferred that there is some lasting damage related to smoke from Vladek's days in the concentration camps. These visuals work alongside the words to help convey to the reader a deeper understanding of the story. One that could not be achieved using only words.

     Spiegelman helped me to have a new outlook on comics. Before reading Maus, I thought comics were solely for the purpose of entertainment and laughter. But I now understand that comics can reach new levels of literary complexity that normal novels cannot.