One of my favourite pages from Art Spiegelman’s comix masterpiece Maus
comes in the very first chapter: here.
The comic, if you don’t know, is about Spiegelman's fathers experience in the Holocaust.
More specifically, it's about Spiegelman’s own efforts to come to grips with that experience while navigating
a really strange relationship with his dad.
Maus is obsessed with this correspondence between the past and the present and
it's a theme that Speigelman is determent to work out visually in his comic.
How does he do that?
Well let's take a look at the page that I mentioned earlier panel by panel:
in the first, Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, takes his grown son Arty back up to his old bedroom
after dinner so that he could do some exercise.
Already the past is signaled here with the empty bedroom of a child that's moved out.
In the second panel, we get a closer look at that room and what Vladek’s done with it:
more remnants of the past like the pennant banner from Spiegelman’s college, Harper,
where he studied art and philoshopy.
We get our first glimpse of the exercicle that Vladek uses to workout,
and this is where Art broaches the subject of the book that we’re reading now.
Notice that the bodies of both father and son are leaning at the same angle.
Spiegelman’s asking his dad to open up so he parallels his body language.
He’s also equating this two men visually
and the book will continue to compare and contrast them until the end.
In the third panel the heads are paralleled this time.
Art’s looking at a picture, but we won’t learn what it is until a few panels down.
In the fourth panel, nothing changes but Art’s head which swivels around to his father
as he makes his request explicit.
And then we come to the fifth panel, which stretches the entire width of the page and has a lot going on.
Right away you can see three key signifiers of the past:
the picture, the identification tattoo Vladek received at Auschwitz, and the speech bubble, where Vladek says,
’'It would take many books, my life, and no one wants anyway to hear such stories.’’
As critic Hillary Chute notes it's ''as if the past articulated, inscribed, and documented
were flanking both men, closing in on them.’’
And ofcourse within this, Arty is inclosed by his father.
In the sixth panel we learn that the photograph is of Arty’s mother, Anja,
which helps us understand the panels that came before.
In the seventh panel we see Vladek’s shoe padelling with effort on the bike but going nowhere.
Then in the eighth and final circular panel, we get our first window into the past,
into the story within a story that will consume the book.
The different shape signals a new narrative thread while the image of Vladek
echoes the photograph thats been a dominant feature of the rest of the page.
‘’In a comic you have various panels, those panels are each units of time.
You see them simultaneously, so you have various moments in time simultaneously made present.’’
That's Art Speigelman, explaining why it's a bit unfair to do what I just did
inconsider the value of a panel on its own.
For Spiegelman, the basic unit of comics is the page.
Its basic function that interplay of moments that happens when you take in several panels all at ones.
In a way that unique to comics time is made spatial, spread out across a surface so that
you can see not only how the past effects the future but vice versa.
What you learn here, that this picture is of Art’s mom, Vladek’s wife who committed suicide,
transforms the meaning of this look here
and all it takes is a glance, the slides movement in the eyes to access that connection.
You don’t need to rewind or read back or start over again.
On the page, those two moments exist simultaneously.
In this sense, graphic design becomes a vital part of comic making.
As the great cartoonist Seth a.k.a Gregory Gallant ones said,
'’The ‘words and pictures’ that make up the comics language are often described as
prose and illustration combined. A bad metaphor:
poetry and graphic design seems more apt.
Poerty for the rhythm and condensing;
graphic design because cartooning is more about moving shapes around -designing-
then is is about drawing.’’
This page of Maus is the perfect illustration of that sentement.
Take a closer look, what do you see in this design?
What about now?
In Speigelman’s book and life, his father is a towering figure.
His experience surviving the most horrifying event in history becomes
the central fact in not just his life, but in his sons.
Thats how the trauma of the holocaust invaded the world and how
the past invades the present. In Maus Vladek literally invades the page and
pumping away on his exercicle as shoe points out,
Arty’s father is literally unable to move forward.
Which is why it make sense that the past begins in the wheel of that bike.
Art Speigelman set out to create a comic that would be rereadable.
Thats why he spend thirteen years writing, drawing, and designing Maus.
Every page is a new pattern to pick apart, a new configuration of moments, past and present,
words and images, father and son.
This attention to design is why Maus is often regarded as the best graphic novel ever written.
It's not that the subject matter is inherently dramatic and effecting, which it is.
It's that Speigelman wanted to tell a story in a way that was unique to the comix medium.
To extract the truth of the holocaust and of his family that only comix can tell.
Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.
If you wanna be notified next time a Nerdwriter video comes out,
be sure to subscribe this channel by clicking the link below.
Almost at two million subscribers, which is crazy.
You can help me get there by subscribing. Thank you so much.
This episode brought to you by SquareSpace.
If you wanna make a website and you want it to be a super easy process,
SquareSpace has some beautiful, award winning designer templates that's just makes the process so simple.
Its got twenty four hour customer service, no upgrades, nothing to install, no patches, ever.
And picking your domain name is really easy too.
You can start your free trial at squarespace.com and if you use the offer code: nerdwriter
you can get ten percent off your first purchase.
Thanks guys, I'll see you next time.
Okay, real quick;
Here is another page I really love for the way that it plays with how a comics page is normally read.
It's the point in the story when Vladek is first entering Auschwitz.
Now, everyone who reads comics knows that you meant to go left to right, then down, then left to right again.
But here, Speigelman cleverly uses overlapping speech bubbles to pull you down the left side.
''...And at that point you have to read down again, and that becomes a descent into the beast's maw.''
Horrifying but beautiful. Anyways, see you guys.