Sketching Reality in Art Spiegelman's Maus

It's no secret that novels often blur the line between reality and fiction. Whether influenced by an author's experiences or drawn from them wholesale, all forms of artwork will always carry a piece of their artist. This is no less true for graphic novels, a medium often stereotyped by traditional capes-and-crusaders-style storytelling. Whether or not this stigma is deserved is an argument for another day, but for now we will venture into a lesser-known genre not typically associated with the great literature classics: the non-fiction graphic novel.

You may ask yourself if this is a misnomer. By their very definitions, non-fiction and novels are considered their own distinct categories. A novel, per tradition, is considered inherently fictitious, and regardless of whether or not you think fiction and non-fiction should be regarded on the same level, I will circle back around to my initial argument that art will always be influenced by the experiences of its author, and there are few better graphic novels to explore this idea than Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking Maus.

Based on the life of Spiegelman's father, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor named Vladek, Maus seamlessly blends elements of the memoir, novel, autobiography, and artistry often thought to be lacking in the comics industry. Finished decades after the conclusion of World War II, Maus also explores the traumatic impact of the Nazi regime and how it continued to affect the Spiegelman family well after its fall. Spiegelman's work, despite showing a fictionalized account of Vladek's life through cartoon mice, cats, and other animals, still makes it clear that a real human being was the subject behind the art. As described in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics,  This is perhaps best seen in the following selection from Volume II of Maus, which features a genuine photo of Vladek taken during the Holocaust:

Source: Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. Pantheon, 1992.

Here, we see Spiegelman blend fiction and non-fiction by juxtaposing the bright and stylized artwork with the grim reality of Vladek's imprisonment. The man's eyes are haunted, and the mouse characters show clear surprise that he is still alive in the living nightmare of Nazi rule. Through this, we see that the Holocaust was more than just a story scribbled on a page. It affected real people, traumatized generations across Europe, and unfortunately, not everyone lived to tell their story like Vladek. Spiegelman integrates the photo because this story is more to him than the histories we often glaze over.