Thirty years after the original publication of Art Spiegelman's collected Maus: A Survivor's Tale in 1992, the influence and impact of that graphic novel still reverberates. Within the comics community, Maus is one of, if not the, book that brought respectability to the comics medium. It told a mature story of a second-generation Holocaust survivor and the impact of his father's experiences in hiding and in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. As arguably the first modern representation of the Holocaust in graphic literature, Maus upended assumptions that comics and graphic narratives were “just” for children. Of course, this does not account for the use of the Holocaust as a plot device in horror and superhero comics of the Golden and Silver Ages, in Horst Rosenthal's Mickey au Camp de Gurs (1942), or of “Nazi Death Parade” published in The Bloody Record of Nazi Atrocities (Arco Publishing, 1944), many of which are discussed in the pages of this book. And with that distinction and the well-deserved attention Maus has received since its publication, comics scholars continue to grapple with how representation of the Holocaust in comics has indeed moved beyond that original graphic novel, if at all.
Given the significance of Maus in the field, it should come as no surprise that Beyond MAUS is not the first book to deal with this subject or even the first to bear this title. An issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (Vol. 17, No. 1), edited by Ewa Stańcyk in 2018, reprinted verbatim as a hardcover volume by Routledge the following year, bore the similar title Beyond Maus: Comic Books, Graphic Novels and the Holocaust. Given its more robust page length, this new volume sets itself apart by approaching Holocaust narratives from a much more global perspective. Whereas the 2018 journal issue largely concerned itself with European comics published since the Holocaust, this latest volume attempts to fill blind spots in the existing historiography on Holocaust comics, interrogating the role these narratives play in modern memory culture through discussions of the aesthetics, the ethics, and the instances of historical truth afforded by serialized narratives, studies on which have been noticeably absent from the conversation to this point.
To this end, the volume adopts several categories of representation for the analyses present among its numerous chapters: Drawing, Stereotypes of Antisemitism, International Comics, Figures of the Holocaust, Limits of Representation, Politics of Remembrance, and Future Prospects. These do not, however, denote the potential organization of the volume. Rather, these allow for sufficient thematic overlap to unify this rich volume. These subjects serve as broader themes, drawing together most of the chapters and providing the volume the appearance of cohesion despite the unique diversity of the comics discussed, of the geographic regions and cultures considered, and the oftentimes disparate approaches taken between the analyses themselves.
That said, the rationale for the volume's organization is sometimes less than obvious. Ole Frahm's chapter, “Ghosts, Golems, Angels: The Medial Specificity of Comics Representing the Holocaust,” explores the stereotypes, imagery, and word-image relationships inherent to comics in lesser-known Golden Age horror comics, Silver Age superhero comics, and modern graphic novels. A personal favorite within the volume, Frahm's chapter exists outside the numbered sections, positioned alongside the introduction. The analysis within thus attempts to create an overall structure for the sections and chapters that follow. The three major points of analysis for Frahm mentioned above, drawn from those broader themes found in the introduction, influence our perspective on subsequent chapters. Part III serves to examine representation of the Holocaust in non-Western comics. Part IV zeroes in on representation and stereotypes in Franco-Belgian publications. Part VI closes the volume and is organized loosely around the subject of concentration camps. Addressing first- and second-generation survivor narratives in both true and fictional accounts, Dana Mihăilescu's analysis of Emil Ferris's comic My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book I and Dennis Bock's look at the representation of a social life among prisoners in the camps are particularly fascinating. Connections between the two are, however, tangential at best despite their grouping here.
The reasons behind Part V are much more puzzling. Georg Marschnig's “‘Students like it, it's still their genre.’ A Qualitative Approach to Teacher's Views on Holocaust Education with Comics” is enlightening in terms of how teachers understand, or misunderstand, the value of comics in the classroom, particularly given recent attention shone on Maus in some American classrooms. However, this is almost arbitrarily paired with Jeff McLaughlin's “Graphic Novels and the Holocaust: ‘Just’ Comics?” McLaughlin does not engage with the current discourse on education much, if at all. Instead, McLaughlin's chapter echoes clickbait articles on social media, listing graphic novels on the Holocaust and briefly reviewing each, bereft of academic analysis or notable purpose. This is perhaps indicative of larger organizational problems within the book. The connective tissue between chapters is left unclear. Each numbered section lacks any statement of intent as to what follows or even the benefit of a title.
Both a positive and a negative of this volume is its use of images. Across seventeen chapters, Beyond MAUS enjoys more than 150 figures. It is difficult to find fault with a volume on comics scholarship using images, as this largely proves the bread and butter of the analysis. However, many of the images occupy one-sixteenth of the page or less each. And of those tiny images, a significant number are of multi-panel strips or entire comic pages reproduced from the original books. There is the occasional half- or full-page image, and these are all gloriously reproduced in full color when possible. As a result, it is quite possible that some of these images look better than they did when first published. With those smaller images, many of the details become lost to a smudge of line and color, and the text is almost entirely illegible. This is unfortunate, as quite often the volume's various authors refer directly to these images and their contents. Undoubtedly, budgetary concerns were at play here. And were all the images blown up to a quarter or a third of the page, sufficient to make them clearly visible, the volume would invariably be two or three times its current length. That said, these tiny images do the art no justice and the analyses no benefit. This is both disappointing and somewhat ironic for the discussion of a medium as dependent upon its relationship between text and image as comics.
All that aside, Beyond MAUS is a valuable resource speaking across multiple genres, styles, and geographic origins within the field of comics, addressing a variety of ways by which the Holocaust is approached in graphic narratives. In addition to those chapters mentioned above, Jaqueline Berndt's “Collapsing Boundaries, Mangaesque Paths Beyond MAUS” and Susanne Korbel's “The Portrayal of Children's Experiences of the Holocaust in Israeli Graphic Novels and Comics,” side by side as they appear in the volume, create an excellent comparison, placing representations of Anne Frank in manga and the recent Anne Frank's Diary (Pantheon Books, 2018) by Ari Folman and David Polonski in conversation with one another. Didier Pasamonik's discussion of the persistent representation of Jews as animals prior to the apparent brilliance of Maus is particularly revealing. And Kalina Kupczyńska's “Haunted But Not Healed” is both surprising and entirely unsurprising in its analysis of the relative erasure of Jewish experience in favor of Polish wartime heroism, even in the concentration camps and ghettos, in official educational comics, contrasting this with independent Polish publications.
Beyond MAUS is not without its flaws. That said, and in much the same way that Lynn Marie Kutch's edited volume Novel Perspectives on German-Language Comics Studies: History, Pedagogy, Theory (2016) shed light on a relatively unexplored corner of comics scholarship, Ole Frahm, Hans-Joachim Hahn, and Markus Streb contribute a significant work to the expanding literature on Holocaust comics and their use(s) as educational tools. This may not be a good point of entry for those new to either Holocaust or comics scholarship, but for the initiated this volume is an immeasurable asset in the evolving discourse on Holocaust representation and the appropriateness and value of comics as a medium to convey these narratives to audiences of any age.
