I have read Maus before, and one of the first things I noticed that I had not seen before was that the title pages of each chapter have a sort of movie-poster quality to them. Page 15 really made this apparent to me when the backdrop to Spiegelman’s father on an exercise bike is a movie poster for The Sheik, the 1921 movie which the first chapter of Maus takes its title from. The other chapters have similar title pages, each with a different name usually written in a text that reminds one of old adventure movie posters. Later on in Maus, on page 102, Spiegelman reproduces another comic of his inside the page. This mimics the sort of frame story which Maus is: a tale of the author’s father but also of the author himself and his interactions with his father as he reacquaints with him to be told the story.
2 thoughts on “Other graphic media in Maus”
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I absolutely agree that Maus draws in many different media types—and we’ll see even more in Volume 2. The fancy word for this incorporation of other media is “intercompositional intermediality”—but more important than the name is what it does. What’s the effect of using a comic within a comic or images that resemble movie posters? How does this representational strategy reinforce the narrative themes of Maus?
Interesting question Professor Sample, and although I can’t provide a definitive answer, I wonder if all of this “intercompositional intermediality” is Spiegelman’s way of insisting that there are many different ways of looking at the Holocaust, and more than one story to tell. While Maus is obviously a great way too look at the tragedy of the Holocaust, obviously readers must keep in mind that this is only one man’s tale. Even though Spiegelman does a great job as “narrator” by letting his father often speak for himself, he’s still telling the story from a very subjective, limited point of view. For example, “Prisoner on Hell Planet” reminds us that his mother was also a Holocaust survivor, and has her own unique and harrowing story that begs to be told. Maybe it’s just Speigelman’s way of telling us “I’ll show you this story, but don’t forget that there are millions of others that are equally important.”
This is just my speculation. Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, or maybe there’s something even more interesting going on here that I just haven’t caught on to.