MAUS

There are a lot of people out there that consider comic books to be..."not cool." By "not cool", I mean, "for kids." "If it has pictures, it can't be significant." I guess that's what people think, anyway. It's like sometime in the past there was some kind of misconception that any comic or Graphic Novel can only be as intellectually stimulating and entertaining as Funky Winkerbean, or, at best, Hi and Lois.
I'm not trying to say I'm an expert by any means. I know as much about comics as my friend Curtis tells me. I know the Frank Miller Daredevil is really good and so is the Brad Michael Bendis version. I know about Sin City, Watchmen and a few others as well. Recently though, I read a book by Art Spiegelman, called Maus. I know a whole lot of people know about this book. The back page tells me it won a Pulitzer Prize and all the reviews are great, so I imagine I'm not alone on this; Maus is one of the best books of, maybe, forever.
The background for the book is the author, Art, talking to his father about his experiences as a Jew living in Poland during the secong World War. The novel glides between the conversations of father and son in the present and the world that Spiegelman creates on the page to detail his father's past.
Ack,I know I'm going to make this into a review or something so I had better switch gears. Let me say that I'm always the first one to make light of an atrocity. I figure I got about 5 years left before 9/11 is fair game. The Holocaust? Yeah, the lease on that being out-of-bounds ended in 1995. Fifty years is plenty long enough. I'm aware I'm only giving 9/11 10 years before it becomes fodder for my joke emporium, but c'mon; I know a lot of people died, but it wasn't fucking genocide. Seriously, every fucking idiot talks about that shit as if it was the end-all-be-all fucking "never saw that shit coming" fucking moment of all time. Fuck that.
Anyway, Maus is really good. You should read it.