MetaMaus: A Look Inside A Modern Classic, Maus (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
You know how I like to "flip" (i.e. read, play, watch and listen to everything) before putting whatever media back on the shelf and giving my opinion, but I'm going to declare MetaMaus UNFLIPPABLE. I don't mean that in a bad way though. It's just that there's SO MUCH information about Art Spiegelman's seminal comics work Maus in this luscious, full-color, abundantly illustrated hardcover that it seems too much to get through unless I was doing a Master's or Doctor's thesis on it. The core of the book is quite good and insightful though. Like Maus itself, it's structured as an interview with Spiegelman, and is split into three real questions. Why the Holocaust? Why mice? Why comics? Lots of illustrations from Maus itself, as well as Spiegelman's notes and sketchbooks, Holocaust documentation, etc. help the reader understand the artist's method and approach, while the interview style keeps things jaunty and easy to read. For people who really want to delve deeper, there are vast excerpts from Spiegelman's transcribed interviews with his father and others, and a DVD-ROM (how old school!) filled to the brim with even more sketch comparisons, video interviews with Spiegelman, sound from the actual tapes he made, historical documents, etc. I've always wanted to give a class in (let's make it university level by choosing the right pretentious title) Sequential Narrative Art, and if I ever did, and students picked Maus as their semester project, I wouldn't expect or need more than MetaMaus in the bibliography. Think DVD extras. Three things they can do are: (a) enhance the experience of watching the movie, (b) serve as their own unique source of entertainment (rarely exceeding the value of the source), (c) exceed the length of the actual film. Though a book, MetaMaus is a little bit of each column, but unfortunately (a) and (b) were not frequent enough for me [see (c)].I most enjoyed Ch.3's talk on visual vocabulary, but I would have benefited had the information on "underground" comics had occurred earlier in the book. Actually I would have benefited from a much larger crash course on the subject, before Maus & after, to put the significance of Maus in context. I arrived at the series with little knowledge about it and hoped this book would give me more insight into what Maus meant for comics as a whole, which seems appropriate for a MetaMaus to do since it came out in 2011. It might help justify Spiegelman's very particular views of how his images can be used, represented, categorized and what art shows it can and cannot be a part of. I understand his desire to protect his creation, such a personal story about a time period that must not be exploited, but some of his concerns seem purely semantic and self-sabotaging.
What do You think about MetaMaus: A Look Inside A Modern Classic, Maus (2011)?
A series of interviews taking place over 4 years, this book really gets into what made MAUS, MAUS.
—briarlyn
This is a powerful insight to the modern classic Maus.
—keremcan
