MAUS-fancy name for mouse

MAUS, the tale of the holocaust, with a certain twist. It seems Speigelman is trying to reach readers through the use of illustrations rather than just words. He uses certain artistic techniques such as shading to highlight the main points in the illustrations so that we as the reader will be able to focus on what is important. For example, Speigelman shades everyone in the audience except for the police officers and the the three talking in the back, thus pointing out who is talking (that with word cloud) and also so that the three characters are easier to find in the story. Who wants to play where's waldo while reading a graphic novel of this kind?

         Speaking of the graphic novel, since there have been numerous attempts at writing novels about personal experiences during the holocaust, Speigelman takes an interesting spin on the whole "genre", if you will. By creating a graphic novel of this multitude, Speigelman is reaching out to everyone, not just the ones interested in words. With his novel Speigelman captures his audience with images, not only words. Anyone flipping through the novel could immediately have their attention grabbed by just happening to look at one of the images and just being interested enough by that to keep reading on. Basically, Speigelman's novel is simply more powerful because of his visual texts. 

         Now, the thought of this book without all of its images and visual texts would simply turn this novel into any other book. It would take away from its simplistic yet powerful nature to let readers “see" what he is talking about. Our imaginations can let us see also, but this way what the author sees is also what we see. The author almost lets us step out of our own imagination and enter his, though colorless and more mouse-like. 

        

Speigelman addresses the idea of audience in a very universal view. Though I feel I am restating this, I believe it true that letting us see what the author does is almost more powerful than words alone, at least for what he is writing about. By using these images he sets the tone for the whole novel by describing and illustrating what he means to say with words. Even though there are words, it is done more in the fashion of a storyboard for a 3-d animation, showing scene for scene what is actually going on. The actual tone of the novel tends is more drastic and serious for a novel with pictures and mice. It almost seems like he is trying to downplay the whole situation by using mice as the symbols for actual people, but by putting them in such a serious situation it takes away from their innocence and "cuteness". It is the perfect blend of innocence (in my opinion characterized by the mice) and actual seriousness of the situation. Even though I have only seen a small excerpt from this graphic novel, if I would have to describe this holocaust novel in a few words or phrase, I think that I would choose "gentle giant".