DRAFT

This month’s program–for all members

 

Our AAUW Book group members were coming up with a list of possible books to read, o

It was October 2020. Our branch had decided to use the theme of diversity and inclusion for most of our programs this past year,  When the Book Group met on a Zoom to propose a list of books for the year, the members decided to select books about  cultures and topics that we knew little about.  We also talked about the range of reading experiences we had had as children and adults.

One of the members suggested that we reada graphic novel. A few of us had read Maus: A survivor’s tale, by Art Spiegelman, which presents a story about the Holocaust and its effects on individuals The impact that the pictures have on a reader is much different from a prose discussion of the same topic. At that time, we had already enlisted Ana Lev to create a comic for each month on a different aspect of diversity or inclusion. We asked Ana for advice and she suggested that we read Fun Home by Allison Bechdel.

This month, our

https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/why-did-spiegelman-choose-make-his-story-maus-336261

dFirst and foremost, Art Spiegelman is an illustrator and cartoonist. In his early career, he worked in bubble gum cards, such as the Garbage Pale Kids. Maus is written as a graphic novel because that is Spielgelman’s medium. Additionally, it was the right medium for the story he was intent on telling—his account of his father’s Holocaust memories told in black and white, with the Jews drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats. Writing a novel or a screenplay with anthropomorphic characters likely would not have had the same effect as clearly seeing it drawn on the page.

It would have been difficult for an author from a different medium to write Maus, as difficult as it would have been for Spiegelman to write Maus in a different medium. His artistic style—simple, stark lines with an almost rudimentary talent for illustrating characters and scenes—also helps evoke the old-world sentiment of the story, and makes it feel as if it is an elderly man’s recollections to his son.