Wow so finding an article was not as easy as he made it sound yes? But luckily I found one, finally. If anyone else already has it, cheers. The review I discovered was written by Ty Burr. Ty Burr...do you think his mother was too cold to finish writing his first name? Like she could have written "Tyler" on the birth certificate, but her hand froze before she could finish? How short are all of the other Burr's names? Makes you wonder. Any who, Ty starts off his article by re clarifying the reason for the author's choice of a comic-strip version of the holocaust; to "give the artist and his readers the distance necessary to absorb horrors almost beyond imagining". Another interesting thing he points out about this particular holocaust survivor story that makes it stand out against all others is the fact that, in a sense, the main character doesn't really survive; at least not as the person he was at the start of the series. The author, Art Spiegelman, does not portray his father(the survivor the story centers around) as a heroic and valiant character, but rather "a neurotic hoarder who may have driven his wife, Art's mother, to suicide". This unflattering and utterly truthful light that Art chooses to shed is characters in is one of many tools he uses to try and shatter any illusions the reader might have of a Hollywoodised Holocaust. Burr goes on to explain that Maus is "not about rounding off the edges of the past", but rather it is "an attempt to understand a man and his place in history through small, evocative drawings". He does not draw the cartoons as cutesy little Disney characters, but rather simple blunt abstractions meant to put off pathos until we are ready to finally take in the details of what happened. BAM.
