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Reviews tagging 'Torture'
Maus: A Survivor's Tale. My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman
18 reviews
spicypb's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide, Racial slurs, Torture, Murder, Injury/Injury detail, War, Genocide, Emotional abuse, Religious bigotry, Violence, Death, Antisemitism, Physical abuse, Gore, Fire/Fire injury, and Gun violence
Moderate: Alcohol, Cursing, Grief, Confinement, Alcoholism, Death of parent, Medical content, Blood, Child death, and Classism
lauren717's review
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Antisemitism, Murder, Grief, Confinement, Death of parent, Child death, Death, Violence, Police brutality, Hate crime, Suicide, War, and Torture
Moderate: Deportation, Suicidal thoughts, Genocide, Slavery, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Gun violence, Self harm, Mental illness, and Forced institutionalization
gemstonejasper's review
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
5.0
Everyone needs to read this and the sequel. It's a raw and powerful story of a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust. Check the content warnings and take care of yourself, but it's a very important book.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, War, Gore, Injury/Injury detail, Blood, Suicide, Grief, Genocide, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Torture, Antisemitism, Medical trauma, Murder, Racism, Body horror, Chronic illness, Confinement, Death, Death of parent, Hate crime, Slavery, and Child death
jbeoin's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
CONTENT NOTE: the Holocaust, murder, torture, violence, genocide, abuse, toxic intergenerational and interpersonal relationships, suicide, institutionalization, death of loved ones, child death
Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History is an absolutely phenomenal comic that I think every adult and every cartoonist should read. It weaves interpersonal relationships and troubles of the modern day into a continuing remembrance of a Jewish family's struggle to avoid the concentration camps and death during World War II, touching on the creation of the comic itself. It truly is a masterpiece.
What Worked for Me:
A quick note: I'm not Jewish, so please bear in mind that my observations of this comic can't bring to it the same nuance that a Jewish reviewer would likely be able to. I encourage you to seek out the reviews of Jewish readers of the book to get a more nuanced analysis than I can provide.
I've had this comic on my list to read for a long time, but I was hesitant to pick it up. I normally struggle with a few things this book brings: it's an older book, older than me, and I often have a hard time reading older books; it's illustrated in black and white with a lot of heavy inking, which is something that I usually find difficult to understand visually; and it has a lot of text and dialogue in it, which is almost always a guarantee to make a book difficult for me with my ADHD, brain fog, fatigue, and so on.
To my delight, this book was not an issue for me in any single one of those areas! So if you struggle with any of these issues, too, I encourage you to give it a try anyway, especially if you can get a physical copy of the book. It may still be something you struggle with, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't this time, and I hope that will be your experience, too. The comic truly is a tremendous one.
✦ Geez, where to begin with what I loved about this? Let's start with how Art Spiegelman intertwines the stories. I've truly never seen anyone weave so many time periods together in such an effortless looking way. I often find time jumps tedious and annoying because they switch from one thing I'm interested in to another moment in a different time and place, and that takes me out of the moment. But Spiegelman uses the strength of his father's storytelling to keep us steady throughout the whole book.
✦ I love the way Spiegelman uses his father's dialect to distinguish between his modern day narration and his speech as his historical self. It really grounds you in the the story and the moment, and it never lets you forget that someone is telling you this story-- in a good way. It really feels like listening to someone reflect, in real time, on a story from their past.
✦ Spiegelman doesn't shy away from portraying his father, himself, and others in the book as anything but a complex and fully realized human beings with flaws and strengths for each of them. I think that's an incredible thing to be able to do, to portray people as they are and not let yourself get in the way of things.
✦ Spiegelman's lettering is truly a blessing to this comic because I never once found myself overwhelmed by huge blocks of text despite the fact that this comic requires you to read a lot of it. The lettering is easy to read, well spaced out, and has a great sense of pace to it. I'm honestly taking so many notes on how he approached this work.
✦ The art itself is so incredibly done. It's done entirely in black and white, with no grayscale of which to speak. To give us a sense of differing values, he uses hatching and blocks of black ink or negative space, and he uses them all so expertly. It was rare that I didn't understand what was happening in a panel, which I find amazing given how many comics I read with heavy inking that befuddles me completely even with color added in.
✦ The characters are drawn so simply, and yet you can almost always tell which person is which because of the characteristics he gives them and the strength of individualizing each person's voice and dialogue, as well as placement of the balloons. As a mouse lover, I also found the mice as humans to be quite charming.
✦ The length of the story felt just right to me. I know there are copies where the two volumes are in the same book, but I read them as two separate volumes. I appreciated the ability to set the first volume aside when I finished it to take some time to reflect on its contents before moving on to the next one. I think this heightens the tension both of the modern day story and the historical one quite nicely.
✦ I really enjoyed Spiegelman's decision to use different kinds of animals to show us quickly and easily who was and was not safe, safer, and safest. I also liked that he explored the dynamics between Jewish people, non-Jewish Polish people, and Germans and how they were layered in those times.
✦ Spiegelman is able to convey a great deal of emotion and tension with very little, and I don't know if a lot of non-artists are aware of how skilled you have to be to do this. With just a slight added line here, a bit of a body language emphasized there, he's able to add depths to his words without having to overly render everything, leaving it easy to read and understand.
✦ Spiegelman didn't shy away from portraying the brutality of the genocide, which I appreciate, but he also didn't go out of his way to make the story incredibly graphic, which I also appreciated. It was still a difficult and upsetting subject to read, of course, but his approach helped to convey the pain and inhumanity of the actions without overwhelming the reader to the point of having to stop completely. I was reminded multiple times throughout the story of the impact this had on his family members through his father's reactions and through the other people's reactions in the book that centered on their experiences and less on the shock value that I think a lot of non-Jewish people might look for in stories that don't humanize the people who went through these horrific events.
✦ I'm in love with the way Spiegelman shows us the realities of each timeline. The struggles, the joys, the truth, the speculation-- all of it. You always come away feeling that this is a true story, from every person's point of view. It shows us, as well, things that many of us weren't taught in school, and I deeply appreciate that. I grew up in the Southeast region of the United States where public education is heavily influenced by white fundamentalist Christians, and while we learned about things like the Holocaust, it was never as accurate or impactful as it should have been. This is a book I would recommend to everyone who grew up being taught, like I was, things like that the United States didn't know about the horrors of the concentration camps, the mass murders, and more until the troops arrived as the "true heroes" of the war. It's yet another important tool to dispel many of the myths our country tries to teach us.
What Didn't Work for Me:
Honestly, there wasn't anything about this that didn't work for me. It was genuinely an amazing book, and it fulfilled everything I want in a comic.
Overall
I give Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History 5 out of 5 speech bubbles: This is an absolute gem of a comic, a memoir, and a piece of history, and I highly recommend that anyone who hasn't read it yet to go grab a copy to read. It's troubling, complex, and beautiful, and it will stick with you.
How to Read It
Interested in checking it out for yourself? Here are a few ways you can get your hands on a copy:
Local Options
Your Local Library!
Your Local Comic Book Shop!
Your Local Book Store!
Small + Indie Options
Bookshop
Loyalty Bookstores
Forbidden Planet NYC
Big + Boxy Options
Penguin Random House
Barnes & Noble
Books a Million
Read This Next
If you liked this, check out This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America, I Was Their American Dream, and Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American
If you enjoyed this review, I have a monthly comic review series called More Comics Please! on my website with interior page excerpts and additional information not shared here on Storygraph. You can sign up to receive them in your inbox by subscribing to my newsletter Into the Bramble.
Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History is an absolutely phenomenal comic that I think every adult and every cartoonist should read. It weaves interpersonal relationships and troubles of the modern day into a continuing remembrance of a Jewish family's struggle to avoid the concentration camps and death during World War II, touching on the creation of the comic itself. It truly is a masterpiece.
What Worked for Me:
A quick note: I'm not Jewish, so please bear in mind that my observations of this comic can't bring to it the same nuance that a Jewish reviewer would likely be able to. I encourage you to seek out the reviews of Jewish readers of the book to get a more nuanced analysis than I can provide.
I've had this comic on my list to read for a long time, but I was hesitant to pick it up. I normally struggle with a few things this book brings: it's an older book, older than me, and I often have a hard time reading older books; it's illustrated in black and white with a lot of heavy inking, which is something that I usually find difficult to understand visually; and it has a lot of text and dialogue in it, which is almost always a guarantee to make a book difficult for me with my ADHD, brain fog, fatigue, and so on.
To my delight, this book was not an issue for me in any single one of those areas! So if you struggle with any of these issues, too, I encourage you to give it a try anyway, especially if you can get a physical copy of the book. It may still be something you struggle with, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't this time, and I hope that will be your experience, too. The comic truly is a tremendous one.
✦ Geez, where to begin with what I loved about this? Let's start with how Art Spiegelman intertwines the stories. I've truly never seen anyone weave so many time periods together in such an effortless looking way. I often find time jumps tedious and annoying because they switch from one thing I'm interested in to another moment in a different time and place, and that takes me out of the moment. But Spiegelman uses the strength of his father's storytelling to keep us steady throughout the whole book.
✦ I love the way Spiegelman uses his father's dialect to distinguish between his modern day narration and his speech as his historical self. It really grounds you in the the story and the moment, and it never lets you forget that someone is telling you this story-- in a good way. It really feels like listening to someone reflect, in real time, on a story from their past.
✦ Spiegelman doesn't shy away from portraying his father, himself, and others in the book as anything but a complex and fully realized human beings with flaws and strengths for each of them. I think that's an incredible thing to be able to do, to portray people as they are and not let yourself get in the way of things.
✦ Spiegelman's lettering is truly a blessing to this comic because I never once found myself overwhelmed by huge blocks of text despite the fact that this comic requires you to read a lot of it. The lettering is easy to read, well spaced out, and has a great sense of pace to it. I'm honestly taking so many notes on how he approached this work.
✦ The art itself is so incredibly done. It's done entirely in black and white, with no grayscale of which to speak. To give us a sense of differing values, he uses hatching and blocks of black ink or negative space, and he uses them all so expertly. It was rare that I didn't understand what was happening in a panel, which I find amazing given how many comics I read with heavy inking that befuddles me completely even with color added in.
✦ The characters are drawn so simply, and yet you can almost always tell which person is which because of the characteristics he gives them and the strength of individualizing each person's voice and dialogue, as well as placement of the balloons. As a mouse lover, I also found the mice as humans to be quite charming.
✦ The length of the story felt just right to me. I know there are copies where the two volumes are in the same book, but I read them as two separate volumes. I appreciated the ability to set the first volume aside when I finished it to take some time to reflect on its contents before moving on to the next one. I think this heightens the tension both of the modern day story and the historical one quite nicely.
✦ I really enjoyed Spiegelman's decision to use different kinds of animals to show us quickly and easily who was and was not safe, safer, and safest. I also liked that he explored the dynamics between Jewish people, non-Jewish Polish people, and Germans and how they were layered in those times.
✦ Spiegelman is able to convey a great deal of emotion and tension with very little, and I don't know if a lot of non-artists are aware of how skilled you have to be to do this. With just a slight added line here, a bit of a body language emphasized there, he's able to add depths to his words without having to overly render everything, leaving it easy to read and understand.
✦ Spiegelman didn't shy away from portraying the brutality of the genocide, which I appreciate, but he also didn't go out of his way to make the story incredibly graphic, which I also appreciated. It was still a difficult and upsetting subject to read, of course, but his approach helped to convey the pain and inhumanity of the actions without overwhelming the reader to the point of having to stop completely. I was reminded multiple times throughout the story of the impact this had on his family members through his father's reactions and through the other people's reactions in the book that centered on their experiences and less on the shock value that I think a lot of non-Jewish people might look for in stories that don't humanize the people who went through these horrific events.
✦ I'm in love with the way Spiegelman shows us the realities of each timeline. The struggles, the joys, the truth, the speculation-- all of it. You always come away feeling that this is a true story, from every person's point of view. It shows us, as well, things that many of us weren't taught in school, and I deeply appreciate that. I grew up in the Southeast region of the United States where public education is heavily influenced by white fundamentalist Christians, and while we learned about things like the Holocaust, it was never as accurate or impactful as it should have been. This is a book I would recommend to everyone who grew up being taught, like I was, things like that the United States didn't know about the horrors of the concentration camps, the mass murders, and more until the troops arrived as the "true heroes" of the war. It's yet another important tool to dispel many of the myths our country tries to teach us.
What Didn't Work for Me:
Honestly, there wasn't anything about this that didn't work for me. It was genuinely an amazing book, and it fulfilled everything I want in a comic.
Overall
I give Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History 5 out of 5 speech bubbles: This is an absolute gem of a comic, a memoir, and a piece of history, and I highly recommend that anyone who hasn't read it yet to go grab a copy to read. It's troubling, complex, and beautiful, and it will stick with you.
How to Read It
Interested in checking it out for yourself? Here are a few ways you can get your hands on a copy:
Local Options
Your Local Library!
Your Local Comic Book Shop!
Your Local Book Store!
Small + Indie Options
Bookshop
Loyalty Bookstores
Forbidden Planet NYC
Big + Boxy Options
Penguin Random House
Barnes & Noble
Books a Million
Read This Next
If you liked this, check out This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America, I Was Their American Dream, and Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American
If you enjoyed this review, I have a monthly comic review series called More Comics Please! on my website with interior page excerpts and additional information not shared here on Storygraph. You can sign up to receive them in your inbox by subscribing to my newsletter Into the Bramble.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Confinement, Deportation, Emotional abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Police brutality, Religious bigotry, Torture, War, Antisemitism, Child death, Murder, Suicide, Mass/school shootings, Death, Forced institutionalization, Hate crime, Violence, Death of parent, Genocide, and Physical abuse
Moderate: Mental illness
amylynn44's review
challenging
dark
slow-paced
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Antisemitism
Minor: Mental illness, Death, Child death, and Torture
ariak07's review
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: War, Hate crime, Death, Antisemitism, Genocide, Torture, Suicide, Religious bigotry, and Murder
mjones14's review
adventurous
dark
hopeful
sad
medium-paced
4.5
It's a horribly sad story and I hate that it was left on a cliff hanger, however I absolutely shall be reading the next installment
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Death of parent, War, Police brutality, Animal death, Antisemitism, Confinement, Death, Gun violence, Torture, Murder, Violence, Genocide, Suicide, and Sexism
pbella3's review
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
2.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Genocide, Murder, Torture, War, Death, Forced institutionalization, Violence, Hate crime, and Injury/Injury detail
flyingryndeer's review
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Torture, Suicide, Genocide, Forced institutionalization, Deportation, Death of parent, War, Violence, Suicide attempt, Murder, Hate crime, Confinement, Xenophobia, Religious bigotry, Racism, Police brutality, and Antisemitism