Goodbye

This is just a little post to say goodbye. Not forever of course. i will be away for the summer, so i probably wont make a post until august. Goodbye, auf wiedersehen, adieu, so long.

Anne Frank: the Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography

The book I’m about to review is based on one I’m sure you’ve heard of. It’s Anne Frank, her complete story from birth to death in graphic novel form by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón. I have learned things that I didn’t know from reading this book.  I didn’t know that Anne and her sister, Margot died weeks before British troops liberated their camp. I didn’t know all of the little stories from Anne’s toddler years. And I didn’t know that the Russians saved her father, Otto.

           

One thing I like is that this book goes further than the original diary. I had no idea about what happened in the camps. I didn’t know about Anne’s childhood friends. It gave me so much more information than the original diary could have. Her diary was left behind when Anne and her family were taken from the Annex.

The great thing about this book being a graphic novel is that you can see how things and people really looked. Before this, I really only knew how Anne looked because of all the famous pictures of her. I had no idea what any of the other people hiding in the annex looked like. In addition to drawings, there are photographs of her family, the VanPels family, Fritz Pfeffer and their protectors.

The art style in Anne Frank: the Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography, in my opinion, is Ernie Colón draws a scene, it looks like a drawing, but when he draws one of the famous pictures, it really looks like the picture.

fantastic. When

I loved this book. It had all the info the diary had and more. It had great art, and it told one of the world’s greatest stories. I would give this book 5 ★s out of 5.  

MAUS

MAUS, Parts I and II, by Art Spiegelman is truly a masterpiece. It’s horrifying, it’s artistic, it’s touching and it’s a true story. Art Spiegelman tells the story of his father, Vladek Spiegelman’s life during the Holocaust while also telling us about his own experiences when he visits his dad.

It really shows how Vladek never lost his survival instinct. There’s one scene where Art and Vladek go out for a walk and Vladek picks up a telephone wire that he finds on the street. He doesn’t have any use for it, but he thinks it will be helpful to have. It tells you how this horrible experience made him want to keep everything he finds instead of spending any money.

Art had the brilliant idea of making each nationality a different animal. The Germans are cats,

the Poles are pigs, the Americans are dogs, the French are frogs, the Swedes are deer, and of course, the Jews are mice.

The art in MAUS is truly beautiful. It also changes as time goes by. In the very beginning there’s lots of detail and shading, but it quickly becomes more simple and flat. The mice’s ears become smaller and they lose their noses.

I usually like when characters in graphic novels look different from each other, but in this context the simplicity makes perfect sense. To the Nazis, anyone in stripes would look the same, and to the Jews, anyone in a German uniform looked the same.

One thing I really like is the clever idea Art had to put pig masks on the Jews who were trying to pass as Polish. When Nazis catch them they tear off the Jews’ masks.

MAUS is definitely not appropriate for the younger audience. There are lots of depressing segments followed by corpses and murder. I myself had a lot of trouble reading it. I would suggest reading it with a parent or a friend. It’s a very touching non-fiction story. I think that its one of the best stories about the Holocaust. I would give MAUS 5 mice out of 5.

P.S.   there is a book called MetaMaus. It’s sort of like a documentary about Maus. It has outlines of the drawings and pictures of the real people.