Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [136]
Maus was the most complex work of sequential art ever created. It is the story of one family’s survival of the Holocaust, but it is also a memoir of how a young artist came to terms with his complicated, prickly relationship with his father and of the relationship between an artist and his art. Spiegelman was unsparing in his portrayal of the book’s characters, including himself, leaving to readers the tasks of sorting through the details and answering the book’s crucial questions about what is right and good in the face of annihilation and, perhaps more complicated, what is right and good once that threat is gone.
By the time Maus: A Survivor’s Tale was published by Pantheon Books, Spiegelman had been living with the project for what seemed like a lifetime, literally and figuratively.
When I began to work on Maus, there wasn’t such a thing as a graphic novel, but there also wasn’t a body of literature about the Holocaust that would take several lifetimes to read. So it was really just a matter of time to figure out “What happened to my parents, and how did I get born?” When I started the book, my father was very much alive, and by the time I was halfway through with it, he was dead.
The Holocaust, of course, was a monumentally tragic story, and any telling of it could not be diminished by the wrong kind of writing or art. On a personal level, Spiegelman had tremendous loss as deep background to his writing: his older brother and only sibling, Richieu, had been a victim of the Holocaust, poisoned by his caretaker-aunt rather than be deported from the Zawiercie ghetto and sent to almost certain death at the camps; and his mother, Anja, had committed suicide in 1968. Spiegelman’s decision to use anthropomorphic animals to tell his story—the Jews were mice; Germans, cats; Polish, pigs; and Americans, dogs—was bold and risky and almost certainly would have backfired in a writer/artist of lesser talent. Even so, it took a while for this creative process to ferment. The first volume of Maus, eventually subtitled My Father Bleeds History, concentrates mainly on Spiegelman’s relationship with his father and his process of self-discovery and is populated almost exclusively by Jews as mice; a second volume, Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began, published five years later in 1991, flashed back to the horrors of the concentration camps and required the delicate working in of the other zoomorphic ethnic groups and nationalities.
Frank Miller, who would eventually become involved in the movie business, including as director of a film adaptation based on Eisner’s Spirit, was heavily influenced by film and by the violent urban setting he saw after moving from Vermont to New York. Although, like Eisner, he was more interested in telling adult stories than in depicting superheroes in tights, he was also astute enough to recognize that the superhero presented him with his entrée into the comics world. When he had the opportunity to work on Daredevil, a slowly sinking Marvel title about a blind crime fighter, he added hard-edged elements of film noir that would later become his trademark in his Sin City graphic novels. His work was daring, uncompromising, flashy, brutally authentic, moody, and violent—and readers responded enthusiastically, boosting the title’s circulation to the point where Marvel started publishing it on a monthly