Maus...again

This is going to be another post on Maus. In one of my earlier blog posts I talk about art in comics and how it has changed and has been reflected in other mediums, in this post I want to talk specifically on the topic of the art work of Maus and what it does to and for the story. In Maus there are two aspects I want to talk about: the very angular art style and then the extended metaphor in the use of various animals to represent the different factions of people in World War 2.
The angular art style in Maus intrigues me because it exists even when things ought to be round, like the clouds rising out of the chimneys of the gas chambers. Everything in in the art work feels angular, which leads me to wonder if it was specifically for Maus that Art Spiegelman uses this art style or if it is just his normal art style. To use a one case example I looked over “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” I see some angular aspects of it, but it still looks more like ink block realism then the angular drawings of Maus itself, so I concluded that Maus’ art style is for Maus. To that end then what does the art style represent in the story? The only answer I can think of seems to be that its pointed and angular as a representation of the pointed conflicts throughout the graphic novel, whether it is Art and his father arguing or the conflict between the Nazi’s and the Jewish people. This seems like a weak guess at best to be forth right, but what else could a style used particularly for this piece mean beyond that when everything is about contrast and opposition? With this question wholly unanswered lets address my second observation on the art the animals.
The animals in Maus each represent a different faction in pre and post war Europe, they address the issues of identity, division, and the role that that faction played in the climate of the times. While those are all interesting topic, I choose to ignore them in pursuit of a different question (though I may come back to them in a later blog post, spoiler alert), why use animals at all? I think this is the largest question that looms over all these other themes. What interests me the most is that these animals aren’t animals with human characteristics, but rather humans with animal characteristics. It is like inverting an Aesop’s Fable. The reason I think Spiegelman does this is so that he may turn it into a sort of bed time story with a moral at the end, but that leads into a cascade of other questions, such as what is the moral? Why doesn’t anyone in the story appear to grow or change? In all I think that the animals allow Spiegelman to label the good and the bad, but even that does not work to its full effect because we see mice betray mice and pigs help mice, the lines are vague even while the metaphor of the animals stands concrete. It is a conflicting ambiguity one that bothers me to know end, is this ambiguity a direct addressing to the concept that the Nazi’s had of humanity being separated so definitely that we were different species, but if he was trying to address that claim why make his wife a mouse in the end shouldn’t she be a frog because she is French and then she could represent that the “races” could mix? Spielgelman seems to mix his metaphor with the potent spices of ambiguity and social critique, but all that comes out of the pot is an ambiguous symbol, a symbol unable to be deciphered is useless. So we must give it a label but to do that eliminates everything else it could be so how does it get labeled? I do not know.