I own both volumes of Maus and bought them while I was in college. When my son was in 8th grade, he saw them and asked to read them. I had a momentary pause but figured that if he can play video games based on WWII or watch movies with Nazi villains, he could see WHY we (well, most of us these days) viewed Nazism as a terrible evil. He consumed them and learned a lot. Not just about the mechanics of the Holocaust but how events like that fuck up people for generations.
I was more worried about the overarching themes of the Holocaust than the stupid nonsense about a couple bad words and a crude very non-sexual looking cartoon boob.
If these were works of fiction, I would side with those saying that this is not appropriate for younger students.
But, as they are not fiction, these depict events that really did happen, the earlier that children are exposed to the evil that exists in our world, the better, IMHO. Otherwise, they may grow up to think that things like genocide are really no big deal, like the people wanting to ban these books.
No, it’s a cat. When Spiegelman is walking to his psych’s building, he captions “The place is overrun with stray dogs and cats. Can I mention that or does it completely mess up my metaphor?” Then on his desk is “Framed photo of pet cat. Really!”
But I think it was more having fun with cat/dog thing than expressing disbelief that anyone would own a photo of a pet. Or maybe pet photos were less of a thing in the (early 90s?) when Vol II was written.
As mentioned, the Jews in the book are depicted as mice and the Germans as cats (and Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, etc). However, the cat in the desk photo is drawn as an obvious real housecat and not one of the German cat-people. But, yeah, also part of the tongue-in-cheek nature of the caption: This is a REAL cat!
Which, incidentally, is the joke with the “No, really!” caption. His therapist had a picture of his cat, which is not unusual. But it presented the artist with a dilemma: if he depicts the scene accurately, he would include the picture of the cat. But under the book’s metaphor, a picture of a cat would read the same as a picture of a Nazi. The caption is both a humorous meta-commentary on this little bit of essential weirdness of “talking animal” cartoons* and also an explanation for an otherwise incongruous element in the scene.
*See also: Mickey Mouse’s best friend and pet are both dogs.
To be accurate, I assume the nudity being cited is from Spiegelman’s earlier underground comic “Prisoner on a Hell Planet” where he shows himself (as a person) finding his dead mother in the bathtub, having committed suicide. So it’s a human set of breasts but from the view of standing at her head so it’s basically a rounded “m” shape with a couple of dots. There is absolutely nothing sexual or arousing about it.
The “Prisoner on a Hell Planet” comic is reproduced in Maus (he visits his father to find him in a weird mood and it turns out that a neighbor’s daughter sees a copy and shows it to her mother who shows it to Spiegelman’s father)
There actually ARE a few depictions of mouse nudity in Maus but I think it’s all male genitals during the Holocaust scenes. They are very crude oval shapes. They also weren’t mentioned in the stories about the book’s removal.
I think it would depend on the Middle Schooler. A few would be intellectually advanced enough. For many a lot of the book will be lost on them. Used as part of a curriculum teaching about HaShoah? I think a good teacher could use it well, maybe in eighth grade or the advanced seventh graders, but there are likely other options that would work better, more aimed at giving that age group perspectives they can better understand.
It is not a kids’ book just because it is in graphic novel form. It is serious and somewhat complex literature. Understanding what’s going on requires a background fund of knowledge and abstract thought capacity that is still emergent for many in that age group. The “adult” aspect is IMHO not the anthropomorphic nipple or the bath filled with blood.
I was of course, referring to female nipples. If not evident from the context, then it should be abundantly evident by my numerous tongue-in-cheek references to “titties” elsewhere in the thread.
I don’t have experience growing up in southern culture, but there’s no shortage of examples of parents in more “enlightened” regions very publicly having problems with certain books being available to children. I lived through the controversy over schools using the book “Heather Has Two Mommies” in New York City before LGBT equality gained broad acceptance across America.
Regarding this, yes, but the general idea of “parental control” speaks to the fact that minors are not capable of intelligently making their own decisions, which all cultures agree on. What I objected to was the idea that “parental control” is some sort of backward-minded uniquely southern notion. The poster to whom I was responding seems to feel that those in the south are controlling for the sake of being controlling rather than acting as proxies for their children due to said children’s inability to manage their own affairs as in most other cultures.
I think Maus is a great work and an excellent way for teenagers to learn about the Holocaust. I read it in high school. I don’t remember if it was part of the curriculum or not.
That said, I think it’s a mistake to equate “removing a book from the curriculum” with “banning”. If it is in fact available in the library and personal copies that children happen to bring to school to read are not taken away, then it’s not banned. The vast majority of books are not included in public school curriculum, and that’s ok. They’re not banned either.
You might be right. Point being they’re human breasts so, while I strongly disagree with the decision to pull the book and think they’re non-sexual/arousing/titillating, it shouldn’t be accidentally construed as “lol they’re scared of mouse boobs”.
Of course. But that shows that the objection isn’t to children seeing nipples, no matter what the context; the objection is only to children seeing nipples in specific contexts.