Week 07:The Legitimation of the Comics

(I was mid typing this when I got the email about being kicked off campus and had to pack to leave campus suddenly, so I'm sorry if this is a little off)


Reading Maus was an experience. It made me angry, it made me cry, and for very VERY small moments I even laughed. It was a very 'blunt' telling of the holocaust. Nobody was glorified, everyone did what they had to to survive. Art writing about learning the information from his father really increased the impact of the story that was told. It was rough seeing the side effects Vladek obtained from surviving the Holocaust. You really feel like you can understand why Vladek is the way he is. There's also a familiarity to it, you can empathize with the feeling of trying to relate to an older family member and trying to understand how life was for them. This was such an engaging story and I binged it pretty fast. As someone in the class had already mentioned, it was interesting to see Vladek being racist towards a black man, even after everything he experienced. There's even a specific part in Vladeks story of the Holocaust where he's called a 'thieving jew' and there he is calling the black man the same thing. That comparison really shocked me. I wish I got to learn more about Art's mother, as she seemed like a very sweet woman.