Underground Comics/ Maus I and II

Underground Comics
I really tried to like these but they just angered me! Maybe it's a generational issue because none of these topics are taboo to me; none of them shock me. In fact they're so corny to me they make me angry. They're incredibly sexist too, even the ones written my women it seems. I don't know what kind of lives these people live, but women don't just start making out with each other out of nowhere. It seems like these were just porn fantasies for men. The drug ones weren't as irritating as the sexual ones, but I still couldn't get into them. I don't see how people could be turned on by these stories? They are CARTOONS! Maybe I'll just never understand that phenomenon. Don't even get me started on Hentai. To each his own I suppose, but it's just sick to me. I wouldn't call myself a "femi nazi" by any means but these comics seriously offended me. I couldn't even get past a few pages of most of them because every time I started kind of getting into it there would be a random sex scene. Anyways, I gave up on Underground comics and decided to read Maus I and Maus II instead. I knew I would love these because I read the first one in High School and never got to read the second one.

The stories of Maus are so interesting and beyond historical reasons. I love the relationship between Vladek and Artie, mostly because it reminds me so much of my family, who are also Jewish. Vladek was just like my Grandpa. He didn't have to endure the Holocaust but he was a child of the depression and when he died, my father emptied his and his mother's apartment. They literally saved EVERYTHING. They saved every piece of junk mail ever received. They had over $2000 worth of coins throughout the house and a bunch of other junk they were saving in case another depression happened. The junk mail rational was that it would be good toilet paper if it got down to that. It is just so crazy to hear about people like that but we have to understand their rationale; they came from different worlds that we will never be able to fully comprehend. It was really touching because Artie tried so hard to make up for Richieu's death, which often happened with children of survivors. A lot of survivors took their anger out on their children because they were upset about losing their previous children to the Holocaust. A lot of survivor's children felt the need to live up to impossible expectations because they simply felt guilty and felt they needed to pay for what their parents had to endure. They felt guilty that their lives were so easy compared to their parents and therefore never felt adequate enough; they were living in their dead sibling's shadows.

Something interesting that happened during the story is that I started picturing the Holocaust in animalistic terms. I really saw Jews as mice and cats as Nazi's. It was hard to get back to reality after reading it because Spiegelman really made the Holocaust seem a little more tolerable to read. I feel it was very effective doing this because young children could read these books and not be terrified and given nightmares while still learning the atrocities of the Holocaust. It was truly horrific but these novels make it a lot more bearable to read about. It is still amazing to me how people had the strength to survive it. I feel really fortunate to be the last generation to be able to actually meet a survivor, but it is also sad because younger generations will never be able to. I know someone who survived the Holocaust when she was a very young girl and I can't even fathom the horrors she had to experience.