Maus & Understanding Comics

After reading both "Understanding Comics" and "Maus," I was able to find a concept that could be found in both.

The concept of Reception/Perception was an interesting concept. In "Understanding Comics," Scott McCloud separated the received and the perceived by a dotted line. For the perceived, he used a very detailed drawing of a human face. He then deconstructed it down to a simple circle with 2 dots as eyes and a line as a mouth. On the perceived side, McCloud deconstructed face down to two eyes, one nose, one mouth. He was showing us, even though it was a smiley face, we still perceived it as a human face. It also showed us that too much perception can take away our imagination.

In "Maus," Art Spiegelman showed this concept by using animals in the roles of human characters. They don't behave like animals, but as humans. They ride bikes, wear clothing and even talk to each other. They also invoked human like emotions like anger and sadness. We as the readers are able to get that these animals are really "humans" going through a terrible event like the Holocaust. Of course, these animals didn't really go through this event, but we perceive that these "people" are going through this event after seeing images like the Nazi flag or a German soldier.

I also found the concept of "masks" interesting. Masks let the audience identify with a character in a book or a movie and safely be in their world thanks to putting said character in a more realistic setting. "Maus" displayed this concept by putting these characters in realistic places like New York or Germany. These places allow use to identify with our characters a little easier.