March 1, 2022 - I Don't Speak German
06:50
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| IDSG bonus episodes are a regular extra just for Patreon backers of myself or Daniel. | |
| Here's a preview of the new one. | |
| The book has a kind of a storied history through publication because it started out as a sort of insert strip in a comic. | |
| And of course, by comic, what we're talking about is an American underground comic. | |
| It's a three-page strip in 1972. | |
| Yeah, in the 70s, in an underground comic called Raw. | |
| And this was kind of in the, I suppose it's kind of the aftermath of the heyday, because the heyday of the underground comic was really sort of the late 60s, early 70s, you know, Robert Crumb and stuff like that. | |
| And so this is still kind of the heyday, but it's the latter end of the heyday of the American Underground comic. | |
| And in Roar, I believe it was called, yeah, this insert comic strip called Mouse by Spiegelman, which is actually quite different. | |
| It's quite similar in some ways and quite different to the eventual comic. | |
| The art style is more detailed and the Nazi cats are much, much bigger than they end up in the finished product, etc. | |
| It's kind of like his first go at it, you know. | |
| And then he, as I say, he sort of gives it another pass and you end up with the material that ends up being what was published as MAUS Volume 1, which is kind of like the, it's basically the first half of the complete story. | |
| Right. | |
| And I do think there's a distinct difference if we're talking about the artistic merit. | |
| I think Mouse One and Mouse Two have like, there's a very, you can see the evolution of the artist through these two books. | |
| And I almost think it's not even worth considering the books together almost, although I think we're going to end up doing that. | |
| But like really looking at it critically, I think Mouse One and Mouse Two are very different texts, you know, but yeah. | |
| This is one of the interesting things about the book that we might end up talking about, which is the fact that the book kind of contains ruminations on its own writing, because the second volume is written after the publication of the first volume. | |
| I mean, not just because it was an ongoing comic strip, but also because I believe the volume one was actually published in book form before volume two was finished, before the material was finished. | |
| So Mouse was serialized between 1980 and 1991 in RAW. | |
| And then it was published as a book in 1986, right? | |
| So it was serialized between 1980 and 1991 as the full thing. | |
| But the first six chapters that make up Mouse One were published in 1986 as a full book, and that got critical acclaim All over the place within the indie comics world. | |
| That's the same year that Watchmen came out, which gives you some kind of context of this is the era of comics becoming an adult form sort of thing. | |
| And so it rides that wave to a certain degree. | |
| Yeah, it's a very important liminal work of art, because it's not just its success, but the process of its creation as an entire text coincides with the process whereby the | |
| The greater artistic complexity that was to be found in parts of the underground comics revolution, not the entire thing, but in parts of the underground comics revolution of the 60s and 70s, began to find its way into the more mainstream comics. | |
| So you have things like the Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and so on appearing. | |
| And that's partly as a result of the influence of the very milieu that Maus comes out of and then feeds back into. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, the first volume gets published in 1986, and then he continues to publish the individual chapters, as I understand, until 1991. | |
| And then the whole book kind of gets released in 1992, and then it wins the Pulitzer. | |
| So, we think of Maus as like one volume, You know, like one book today, but like for 13 years, it would have been seen as like this kind of continuing thing that was happening in the pages of this like magazine with a kind of major touchstone in 1986 when the first volume was released. | |
| And I think the bulk of the second volume is written in response to some of the response to the critical response to the first volume. | |
| And I think that's I think that's an important inflection point in terms of kind of understanding the text. | |
| Very much so, because the second volume contains ruminations on the first volume, the critical response to the first volume, and how he feels about the process of writing it, and his problems with continuing past volume one. | |
| There are brutally self-confrontational images like him. | |
| Like a pile of corpses, you know, underneath him and the book, the success of the first book, he depicts himself as being successful on top of this pile of the murdered Jews of Europe, you know. | |
| And as might be, you know, cognizant later, he He portrays himself as a human being wearing a mouse mask, which is a visual metaphor from both the first and the second books do this. | |
| But, you know, when you are faking something, you know, so when at one point Vladek Spiegelman is faking being a pole and speaking to another Polish Jew, and they're both wearing mouse masks, despite the fact that the Polish Jew is wearing a ping mask, which is the The signifier of the pole, you know, so yeah, no, the question of the mask and the way the mask is used in the text is fascinating. | |
| Like, we could talk for an hour just about that, right? | |
| But I think it is useful that both Spiegelman, you know, is wearing that in that moment in which, like, at the end of the panel, at the end of the page, you see him, like, Sitting on top, you know, a pile of corpses, but also his therapist, a few pages later. | |
| He's also a Holocaust survivor, a Jewish Holocaust survivor. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And they're both wearing the masks. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, I think we're definitely going to get because, you know, one of the things I should have said since we're explaining everything is that this is the comic where the Jews are portrayed as mice and the Nazis are portrayed as cats. | |
| Well, it's actually the Germans are portrayed as cats. | |
| And the French are frogs, and the Poles are pigs, and Americans are dogs, and things like that. | |
| All the way through, that is sort of the conceit of the comic. |
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