19

Maus

Author: Art Spiegelman

Volumes: 2 books (or one complete book)

Publisher: Penguin [click HERE for Amazon complete edition page]

To my knowledge, this is the only banned book in the entire list. It’s messed up, but there are those that would rather you didn’t read about what the Germans did to the Jews… or even what the Polish did to returning Jews after the war had ended. We are a flawed species with a somewhat cruel past behind us (to put it lightly), but we record these events in history so that we may learn to avoid repeating the same mistakes our ancestors once made.

Art Spiegelman interviews his dad (a holocaust survivor), and uses the medium of comics to share his story with the world. I think it’s genuinely important to the entire medium that this comic exists at all. The very idea of portraying the Jewish as rats, the Germans as cats and the Polish as pigs for instance assists in reflecting upon our dark past with a tiny bit of detachment from the reality that it was in fact all human beings.

Personally my only real issue with the comic is that there are a lot of times where character’s designs aren’t distinct enough from each other bar a few very minor details that black and white images can’t render very well in Art’s chosen style. It’s never so bad that I can’t read through and feel the emotions on display, but it can get to a point where a page or panel is re-read just because I may have attributed the wrong voice to the wrong character.