Maus, la bande dessinée et le dessin comme témoignages sur la shoah

Abstract

ABSTRACTIf Maus is nowadays unanimously acclaimed as a masterpiece, numerous questions were raised since its publication, which show several misunderstandings due to Maus genre itself: a comic book. When it was published, for the first time the testimony of an Holocaust survivor was genuinely narrated through a comic book. Nonetheless, questions were raised regarding the nature of Maus and whether it was a biography or a fiction. A comic book, even more a comic book depicting the Holocaust with animals representing humans, couldn't be a representation of reality, while a text, or a movie, cause no such question regarding the transposition of reality through a way or another. Such questions surrounding Maus shed light on a broader topic, the common perception of drawing. It can be summarized by a simple statement: drawing is art. While tens of thousands drawings were drawn by Holocaust (or Third Reich) victims, they are usually seen has illustrations, pieces of art, while they should be seen for what they are really: first and foremost draw testimonies, i.e. sources, which should be analyzed and used as such. Maus is also milestone in comic book history. Then the comic industry, both in Europe and the US, was perceived essentially as a children media. Maus is one of the comic books published in the 1980's which changed the perception of the genre and gave to it credibility. If Maus had a major impact on the public opinion regarding comic books, it had also a major impact on the genre itself and is by many aspects a turning point. It innovates on various aspects: one of the first autobiographical comic books, the project was conducted during almost two decades, from the beginning of the 1970's until 1991 and the publication of the second, and final, volume, with a format previously unseen. And while before its publication only a handful of comic books dared to address the Holocaust, since dozens comics books did so.