What do we consider non-fiction? Obviously something that is not fiction, and is true, but does that mean it has to be old, boring, crusty, and fit nice and neat into the Dewey decimal system? I don’t think so, and obviously Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner don’t think so either. Eisner and Spiegelman took the idea of non-fiction books and turned it on its ear by adding “graphic novel” to the non-fiction genre. As Scott McCloud explained to us in Understanding Comics, a comic, or virtual sequential art can be defined "as art that is in pictures, it is the art of comics" (McCloud 5). In Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus we are introduced to our narrator and his father, Vladek. Vladek is a survivor of the Holocaust and his son Art or Artie, is telling readers the story through discussions with his father. Maus also seems to serve a dual purpose for the author, it tells the horrific events of the Holocaust, from the perspective of those that lived through it (Vladek), but it also seems to serve as a sort of therapy for Spiegelman. Spiegelman takes the events of the Holocaust and makes them more palatable by portraying the different people as animals; mice represent Jewish people, the Germans are cats, and the people from Poland are pigs. By portraying characters like this, Spiegelman is embracing another concept of McCloud’s which is “amplification through simplification”.
I do not think that calling Will Eisner’s Contract with God and Art Spiegelman’s Maus a non-fiction graphic novel a misnomer. Why can we have the historical fiction genre, which is an author writing a story set in a specific time period and might borrow true characteristics, events or people of the time period, and not non-fiction graphic novels? One of the reviews I read for Maus defended the idea of Spiegelman writing about his father’s experiences during World War II and Hitler’s “reign” in Europe and making it a comic (graphic novel). By covering the events of the Holocaust in this way, is gives readers a distorted reality; the events portrayed, while true obviously were not carried out by cats, mice, and pigs.
The only thing that non-fiction absolutely has to be, is true, and Art Spiegelman embraces that idea with Maus and succeeds in giving readers a first-hand account of the Holocaust, but in a more tolerable format, and that format is comics. Just because something is told in the form of pictures doesn’t make it any less true, if this were true then why do historians hold hieroglyphics and cave-paintings in such high esteem? I’m pretty sure Scott McCloud makes the same point, the art style has changed, but that doesn’t mean the storytelling has.
I do not think that calling Will Eisner’s Contract with God and Art Spiegelman’s Maus a non-fiction graphic novel a misnomer. Why can we have the historical fiction genre, which is an author writing a story set in a specific time period and might borrow true characteristics, events or people of the time period, and not non-fiction graphic novels? One of the reviews I read for Maus defended the idea of Spiegelman writing about his father’s experiences during World War II and Hitler’s “reign” in Europe and making it a comic (graphic novel). By covering the events of the Holocaust in this way, is gives readers a distorted reality; the events portrayed, while true obviously were not carried out by cats, mice, and pigs.
The only thing that non-fiction absolutely has to be, is true, and Art Spiegelman embraces that idea with Maus and succeeds in giving readers a first-hand account of the Holocaust, but in a more tolerable format, and that format is comics. Just because something is told in the form of pictures doesn’t make it any less true, if this were true then why do historians hold hieroglyphics and cave-paintings in such high esteem? I’m pretty sure Scott McCloud makes the same point, the art style has changed, but that doesn’t mean the storytelling has.
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