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Non-fiction graphic novel -- Oxymoron?

By ShockeronShockSt

Non-fiction graphic novel sure sounds like an oxymoron doesn’t it? Well, time to open your mind to something new. Maus by Art Spiegelman completely defies everything you’ve thought about graphic novels. He tells the true story of his father’s experience as a Jew during Hitler’s regime and guess what? It’s a graphic novel. Maybe we should call it a visual, sequential account of a true story? That’s a mouthful though and in all reality, Maus is nothing but a non-fiction graphic novel. The same goes for Contract with God which is said to have inspired Spiegelman to write Maus. This non-fiction graphic novel (this really should just be a new genre) follows a man and everything that he goes through following the unexpected death of his daughter. Having a true story be represented through the art of a comic is truly inspired. It can bring reality and a new level of depth to the story that may not be possible through just words. Spiegelman brings a whole new life to the characters of himself, his father (Vladek), his mother (Anja) and his stepmother (Mala) through his art. With the Jewish characters being featured as mice and the German Nazis as cats, Spiegelman introduces a motif of the classic cat chasing the mouse without ever verbalizing it. You can’t do that in a regular book. Spiegelman’s depictions of the fear that Vladek and Anja experienced is beautifully illustrated. He presents the story of the Holocaust but does not show it in the horrifying light that one would usually expect. He is able to represent the Holocaust with a sense of darkness but somehow brings some humor to it by juxtaposing his father’s story with the one of his and his father’s tormented relationship as the two continuously fail to see eye to eye on anything and everything. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics discusses how the panel of comics can represent time or motion. Page 116 of Maus ii uses a sort of polyptych form of panels. While McCloud says that this type of expression of motion involves a moving figure that is imposed over a continuous background, Spiegelman uses one figure to fill multiple panels showing that time is passing even though Vladek is not moving while he is talking to Art, as shown in the attached image. Not only that, but McCloud talks a lot, in Chapter 4, about how words in the panels of a comic take up time. Words cannot be expressed in a single moment, so a person speaking takes up time and this is how Spiegelman shows the passing of time in Maus. 

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