Reading through what people have posted on the blog, it is interesting to me how many of us knew of Maus or had read it before taking this class. Some people knew it from high school, others from previous college courses. I was required to read Maus in my Western Civilizations class. It kind of reminded me of Kyle Baker and how much he wanted Nat Turner to be used as an academic resource. It makes me wonder if Art Spiegelman had similar intentions when writing Maus, or if that thought came after its publication.
I would also like to comment on what seems to be the most popular topic, Spiegelman’s use of animals in the story. The first time I read Maus for my Western Civ class I read though and really appreciated the separation of race into something so simple as animals. I think it would have been much more difficult to show the differences between the Jews or Poles or Nazis if they all looks like normal human beings. That being said, I do not think that I ever saw the animals as humans in animal masks, more animals that acted like humans. I think that Spiegelman’s decision to make his characters animals not only helped me a reader differentiate between races, but really captured how important race really was at the time. I feel like the time of the holocaust really made race stand out and made people into “the other,” almost like another species such as cats or mice. It brings out this feeling of instant hostility based on appearance, like a cat would do to a mouse, or a Nazi would do to a Jew. At no point while reading Maus was I distracted or confused by the use of animals, and most importantly I never forgot that this was a real story that did not happen to animals, but happened to human beings.