MetaMaus

Built around a series of taped conversations with English Professor Hillary Chute, Art Spiegelman's MetaMaus has been years in the making, so to speak. I love Art Spiegelman. The Pulitzer-winning Maus has always been meta. We know that. But a memoir of the creative process and the artist behind Maus must be framed and fleshed out for posterity.

The book's the man's birthday present, and by proxy, it's mine to read. Ha. If you haven't read the Maus, please don't start on MetaMaus. You'd be quite bewildered. There isn't any actual text of Maus in it. It makes many references to Maus. There's a dvd that comes with MetaMaus. Watch that first. It can be either a refresher or an introduction. (Read reviews on here, here and here.) 

The words/names Birkenau and Auschwitz should never be used lightly or randomly (along with other similar words/names in other geographical and historical context). Art Spiegelman never forgot that, obviously. Graphic novels aren't hilarious all the time. They don't usually bother to make jokes out of nothing. Satire doesn't need to be humorous either. Although...I still have difficulty with accepting the depiction of Jews as mice (not unusual as it has been done so since the 20s), Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. Talk about stereotyping! Anyway. Spiegelman is a keen observer of humans and has an acute understanding of the ripple effect and repercussions. He's brilliant in being able to negotiate this very painful and inflammatory subject in his treatment of it as a graphic narrative without losing the reverence for history and realism in his stylistic treatment of the work.

From The New York Times' 2011 article,

Twenty-five years after its original publication, “Maus” continues to provoke. Mr. Spiegelman recalls an incident in Germany in 1987, when a reporter barked at him, “Don’t you think that a comic book about the Holocaust is in bad taste?”   

The author responded, “No, I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.”

Art Spiegelman's career has always been intertwined with the political fallout from Maus, and his subsequent choices of topics in political cartooning. Who can forget his eerie and poignant cover for The New Yorker issue in September 24, 2001? Hey, I'm still buying stuff from TOON Books for the little tots whose parents have banned Disney from their bookshelves and tv-time! :)

In MetaMaus, this extract is part of Spiegelman's answer to the question "How long did it take you on average to work through each page?"

In the world before computers I found myself rewriting each phrase maybe twenty times. Whatever appeared in a balloon would sometimes look like concrete poetry after I finished distilling the language on a sheet of paper. Since every eighth of an inch was significant, I couldn't use Vladek's language verbatim. I'd find myself trying to rephrase something that still kept the cadences of his broken language, but would reduct it down. So, for example, I might use "go" instead of "walk", since it only took up two characters rather than four. I feel sorry for all the poor foreign translators of Maus, since often my decisions can't be replicated in another language.