MAUS

This comic really read almost like a book.  It was really easy to get hooked on reading it.  The characters themselves were so lifelike and real.  I love the way his father would just go off the handle for no reason if something wasn't clean or he'd get distracted by something and totally uproot where the story was headed.  And I know that his father was from Poland so he had an accent, but the way he spoke while telling the story like "He survived me my life that time..." made it really interesting in a sort of Yoda-esque way.  It really kept me interested because it wasn't what you normally expect from narration.
And the relationship between the father and the son was so estranged.  It makes sense though, for there to be a rift between two completely different life experiences.  I really liked the coat example, where his father threw out his old coat and gave him that huge coat that was like whale sized.  It really illustrated the gap between them.  I know I have had similar clashes of different viewpoints with my parents because of the generation gap.

I think the comic really wove between the past and present well.  The stark black and white of the comic really gave it a harsh realistic quality. Some of the images really got the sense of despair across like this one.

I really enjoyed reading this graphic novel because it was very true.  Not only was it based on true events, but the ways it was expressed through images was very bold and didn't hold back.  The one that really stood out to me was when the father was talking about what happened to his first son and he said that the soldiers were killing small children in another place nearby and the German's swung the kids by their legs against a wall and "they never anymore screamed".  It was just a good piece of writing and almost bone chilling.  And there was a very good balance between the writing and the actual panels.  It flowed really well in terms of images and things said.  I think it would have been easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of words in the actual story, but I was wrong.

I believe that this novel in particular harkens back to Scott McCloud's comment on how we can easily put ourselves in the shoes of a character if they are more cartoony.  And I think it really worked because they weren't drawn to be overly funny looking or deliberately cute.  I think the comic would've lost something, had he taken it any other route, because the story is so serious.  He made them vulnerable and the whole, cat-Nazis and mice-Jews really amped that up.
   This comic in particular really reminded me of The Grave of Fireflies just because both conveyed the terrible actions that happened during those horrible times with such a sense of reality.  The Grave of Fireflies describes the destruction of this family during the bombings during WW2.  And Maus really showed the Holocaust as it was without any cuteness and/or refinement.  These were both horrific events and I think that the people that wrote this comic and did the movie showed what happened truthfully and that is really important.