Art Speigelman's Maus is a story of, simply by looking at the cover art, surviving the rain of Hitler and the Nazis taking over and creating the Holocaust. Upon first opening the pages to it and adjusting to the style, it looked like heavy hatches into the paper than swift lines on a paper. Everything is rough with no actual added tones or layered backgrounds. It's either silhouettes or cross-hatching, fitting well to the tone. The next thing is that there's no human characters, but anthropomorphic mice, cats, pigs, dogs, and frogs. The Jews are the mice, the pigs are the Polish, the cats are the Germans, and the dogs are the Americans. I find it fitting though, that the rank of animals to one-another rank from the cats chasing the mice, to the dogs chasing the cats. Another thing I noticed is that the normal faces of the animals had no emotions besides the eyebrow lines and their mouths, but when there were dire situations the character were experiencing, their eyes would bulge and not look bead-like. The graphic parts of the retelling of the Holocaust were never fully shown to an extent, either. Most brutal beatings or killing where off the panel, but only emphasized in an entire panel (like the burning of the mice in the graves) to explain a heavy moment.
Besides the visuals and grave history, the overall retelling of Speigelman's story is entertaining to read, simply by the way the father is retelling it to his son. Artie could have clearly left out the shenanigans that happened between the main storytelling, but it's a nice break to read. It's almost like getting fun little commercial breaks between a long documentary. The grammar in a lot of the panels is mixed in format as well, and I don't know if it was Artie's mistakes, or the word-by-word retelling of his father's English.
