Anthropomorphism In Art Spiegelman

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Opening Line. Comics and cartoons have been using anthropomorphism as a literary device for decades. The Warner Brothers, Hanna-Barbera, and Disney have all produced numerous print and television media filled with walking, talking animals. While these colorful works are usually intended for children, anthropomorphism has made its way into the culture of comics, invading the adult-oriented publications, as well. Comic artist Art Spiegelman is known for creating one of the most famous examples of serious anthropomorphism in the history of comics: a Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel entitled Maus, wherein a firsthand account of the Holocaust is told by Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, and illustrated within a metaphor of Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs, and Americans as dogs. Art Spiegelman’s use of pictorial symbolism in Maus …show more content…

In the frontispiece of Maus II, Spiegelman included a quote taken from another 1930s anti-semitic German newspaper, which read: “Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed. . . . Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal. . . . Away with the Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!” (The Complete Maus 164). This quote exhibits, once again, the German media’s obsession with associating so-called “undesirables: with rodents. The persistence of the Nazis at referring to the Jews as vermin manifested in reality when they used Zyklon B, a substance literally used to kill rats, as a method of committing genocide (Hammond, par. 7). Yet, despite its substantial impact on Spiegelman’s work, Nazi propaganda was not his sole influence. Other direct inspirations included Franz Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or

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