Maus “Book Banning”

[Battlegrinder]

For the record, the book is non-fiction outside of drawing animal heads on characters. It's a true story of a guy telling the experiences of his parents living through it, and of him writing it.

The animal features are actually a great way to talk about the racial essentialism of the Nazis while pointing out it's meaninglessness.

I'm not sure that I buy the "it's a great way to talk about racial essentialism" idea, because having the germans be cats and jew be mice sounds like it frames the idea that jews are actually a fundamentally different race than the germans as correct and accurate.

 

[Cyan Saiyajin]

The left realize that they need to be reasonable.

So they switch from queer shit and brainwashing little kids into mutilating their genitals to furry porn and the good old cliche of evil Nazis.

More like trying to conflate one with the other. There is no switching about, just a way to confuse and cloud the issue with the more offending material. This is an attempt to hide the worst stuff behind a relatively more resonable example.

 

[Captain X]

Again, I managed to go through school and got a pretty decent understanding of WWII and the Holocaust without reading this comic book. Actually I used to joke with my classmates every year about how history seemed to end with WWII, because it would take up so much time that the school year would end before we could get any further. Also, how much of a deep, personal understanding does an 8th grader need outside of, you know, the facts of what happened. Can they wait a couple years and watch Schindler's List if you just absolutely need them to have media outside of the "dry" history text?

 

[Abhorsen]

I'm not sure that I buy the "it's a great way to talk about racial essentialism" idea, because having the germans be cats and jew be mice sounds like it frames the idea that jews are actually a fundamentally different race than the germans as correct and accurate.

Eh, there are typical ways the ethnicities look, which did matter during the holocaust because they'd be used to identify people as jewish by nazis. But the animal faces are an easy way to show it without needing to get into specific stereotypes, and also show how people disguised as one or the other simply by having the characters wear animal masks.

 

[Battlegrinder]

Eh, there are typical ways the ethnicities look, which did matter during the holocaust because they'd be used to identify people as jewish by nazis. But the animal faces are an easy way to show it without needing to get into specific stereotypes, and also show how people disguised as one or the other simply by having the characters wear animal masks.

The more I hear about this book the less positive I feel towards it. The idea of a serious graphic novel retelling one's man's experience in the holocaust sounds totally incompatible with "hide from the nazis via incredibly obvious halloween disguises" plot. One of those ideas is a very serious and emotionally intense narrative, the other one is literally a Key and Peele sketch.

 

[ShieldWife]

I have to admit, the art is creepy:

 

[Abhorsen]

The more I hear about this book the less positive I feel towards it. The idea of a serious graphic novel retelling one's man's experience in the holocaust sounds totally incompatible with "hide from the nazis via incredibly obvious halloween disguises" plot. One of those ideas is a very serious and emotionally intense narrative, the other one is literally a Key and Peele sketch.

It's a way of expressing something complicated simply, basically a symbol. Because, (as shown above) everything is sorta creepy and played seriously, it never gets funny.

 

[ShieldWife]

Obviously, some of those pages would be still extremely disturbing with humans being depicted, like a giant pile of corpses. Though for some weird reason it seems maybe even creepier when they have mouse heads.

The style of art is unusual. They’re not the typical cartoon mice we are used to seeing: not Mickey, Jerry, Remy, or Gus Gus. They’re human bodies with more animalistic mouse heads: black expressionless eyes. It’s creepy.

The creepiness of the art was probably a bigger factor in choosing not to include it in the curriculum than the language or nudity, but they can’t just say “the art is creepy.”