Maus and the Comic Triangle Concept

Throughout the first chapters of the book Understanding Comics, many concepts are brought up regarding comics and how they can convey not just ideas and concepts, but also convey messages of differing meanings.  One such concept, a chart that appears on page 51 of the book (also on pages 52 and 53 for a better understanding of the chart), connects pictures, realism, and language into a triangle that represents the "pictorial vocabulary of comics or of any of the visual arts" (51).

To give a brief summary, the triangle works like this:

- The closer to language, the simpler the art becomes
- The closer to realism, the more realistic the art becomes
- The closer to the picture plane, the more that each individual line, shape, and color can be themselves and not pretending to be something else.

For the purposes of this reflection, we'll be ignoring the the picture plane part, as that mostly deals with art being art and not to convey a narrative or idea.

This concept lends itself very nicely towards Maus.  One of the most noticeable things is that, art-wise, the comic centers around generally stylized (but still simplistic-looking) anthropomorphic animals, each one symbolizing a different nationality/race/religion - the most notable being that the Jewish people are represented as mice while the Nazis are represented by cats.  While still having mostly detailed backgrounds (with the occasional panel dark and detail-less background), the characters themselves lend their simplicity to give the illusion of realism while not being real.

Language-wise, the story is told through the eyes of a Jewish survivor from World War II.  Going back to what I said earlier, the fact that the art of the story is told using anthropomorphic animals lends itself to the dire and bleak times facing the Jews during the war.  Not only does the cat-and-mouse visual idea lend itself well to the story, but it also gives the reader a sense of the visually horrifying nature that Jews faced during WWII.

Maus' WWII narrative roots and the artistic anthropomorphic style of cat-and-mouse gives the reader a more visual idea of the horrors of WWII that befell the Jews.  Using this chart's concept helps give the reader a better understanding of Maus' mature theme.  When used correctly, as in the case of Maus, the chart can be the best weapon a person can have in creating a comic that best suits its focus - both in visual and narrative sense.