For this week’s blog post, I want to write about how the usage of images in Maus is an additional layer that provides meaning in addition to words. Unlike the other texts we have read so far in class, Maus has been the only one that has broken away from the word-only method of telling a story. Now, instead of only needing to look at what is written, Maus asks us to analyze not only words, but also the details that are drawn in the images. How a character is drawn and what details are included shows us elements that we can use to further our understanding of what we are being told.

The particular scene that I want to focus on is a scene at the beginning of the first chapter in the first book. Here, Artie has come to see his father Vladek in order to ask him to recall his story of surviving through Auschwitz. After a short scene where Spiegelman sets up the strain between Vladek and his wife Mala, along with giving us information about people backgrounds, Vladek goes with Artie to a room where Vladek starts pedaling, because it is “good for [his] heart” (13). After that, Artie begins asking his father about the events of his life in the Holocaust because he wants to draw a book about it (13).  The aspect of the scene that was particularly interesting was how the middle panels were drawn. As Vladek pedals, his whole body is situated in the foreground of the panels, and is much larger than Artie. His body extends outwards onto the panels above it, so that it appears that Vladek’s body is actually located in more than one panel. This gives him the sense of being massive, dominating the space he is in.

I interpreted this as the size of Vladek in these panels is an indication of how important he is to the story, not just Vladek himself as the person, but also what he represents to the story that Spiegelman is trying to tell, namely, the events of Poland, the war, and Auschwitz. We can see in the panel where Vladek is pedaling that there are a series of numbers that have been tattooed onto his arm: “175113” (13), which are the numbers given to Jewish prisoners at the concentration camps. The inclusion of this details is not something that is trivial, as it must have been deliberately placed there to show Vladek’s connection to the Holocaust; the numbers have been literally burned onto him as a living reminder of the events he has been through. This, in connection to how much space he takes up in the panels and his position in the foreground represents how crucial Vladek is to the telling of the story.

The comic form allows Spiegelman to use two different mediums in order to tell his story. As readers, the use of images offers us a new perspective in looking at the texts we study and how we gain information from what we read. Not only do we need to consider what is written, but we now also need to consider what we identify in this spacial environment of images and how that affects the narrative, knowledge and experience.