The Holocaust is a very dark time in world history. Maus: A Survivors Tale by Art Spiegelman shows is kid friendly and easy to read despite the event that is taking place is dark and dreadful to talk about. The vivid cartoonish comic aspect, the foreign improper language, and the imagery of a father telling a story in his rocking chair to his son shows how the story is easy to read and could be a children's story.

Mr. Spigelman captures so much in this short story comic. The visual of a comic change the aspect from the holocaust to an epic story from the past that one's dad explained happened in their past. The animals used in the story were very unusual with the face and the ears of creatures resembling a little of a mouse, almost like he tried to capture how the people were feeling and transformed them into who the Germans saw the Jews. In most stories one tries to visualize exactly what the author is saying and in this story he gives us a visual and it is very far from what most people would imagine when just reading about vivid imagery given. The comic shows the true emotion of the story by the tone and the expressions of the characters in the story. A comic reads differently than a regular short story. You just read the words, left to right until you reach the bottom of the page. A comic is like an adventure unraveling an adventure that you read left to right panel to panel reading the narrator's or main characters words, then you have to read each character in that panels dialog bubbles. It lets one know which character is speaking, there is just so much more involvement and a much better reading experience than a plain written story. The imagery given to us the comic changes the way you read the whole story because one can almost feel exactly what each character feels in his story because we can see exactly what is happening, almost like you are right there while it is happening. The comic aspect of this story really made it engaging and exciting to experience. Another thing that draws you into this story and makes you feel like you were right there when it happened is the foreign and improper language that Spigelman of this comic.

How Mr. Spigelman uses the language in this comic is genius. He makes mistakes in the text on purpose to show that the person who is telling the story is foreign and doesn't know exact and formal English. Valdek the storyteller says "When we were everybody inside " (Spigelman, 138) The language is something that someone must read twice to fully understand what Valdek truly means but it gives one a good impression what his accent sounds like to someone whose first language is English. After reading some of the miscues in the text one may start to see the comic different than they were before because one may start to see themselves actually inside of the story by seeing exactly what happened and hearing exactly the way the people spoke then. The language pulls this whole story together and makes it more than just a story or a comic .It makes it an experience like one is inside the story seeing what actually happened in real time, one can see Valdek sitting in his rocking chair then starting the story and it is almost like one is put into the story but just being able to watch. One can hear and see everything but they cannot interact because they are amazed in what is happening and how real this story is in the tone and speech coming from Valdek. The final aspect of this story that makes it all come to life is how child friendly this story is through the speech and the comic.

The cartoonish feel of these creatures are very appealing and makes one want to learn more about them. The title of this story "Maus" translates to Mouse in English. This shows in the comic that the animals slightly resemble a mouse but not enough to know that is exactly what the animal is supposed to be. The characters in this story are meant to remain a mystery in this story to show how they really feel and what the Germans saw the Jews as. The cartoonish feel to a child in this story must be very welcoming and draw in a child because when seeing a cartoon children are usually introduced to nice and happy characters. The text inside of this story is not complicated and hard to understand so a child could most defiantly enjoy this story. The comic feel to this story will also draw children into this story. Most of the time when seeing a cartoonish story the ending is usually funny like the small comic strips that a child might read in their father's newspaper each week, so some children may dive right into this story expecting that and may read the whole story through and have no idea what they have read. The children who like to read and thoroughly enjoy picture books will like this story. They will be amazed and confused by the imagery given by Mr. Spigelman and will hopefully want to look back and try to catch every detail he put into the comics to show all of the emotion behind Valdek's story. Reading this story slow and carefully one will find a lot of things inside of the text and inside of the details in each comic panel and give one the full experience of this story that it truly shows.

Everything inside of this story has one hoked from the beginning. The storytelling feel brings back some peoples childhood of where their grandparents and parents told vast and amazing stories sitting upon their rocking chairs. The imagery from each panel going along with the story that gives you a visual representation of exactly what is going on the whole story and puts one right into the action like a movie playing inside of their head. Valdek's language and how differently he says things that may not be grammatically correct because he is foreign but it brings true life and emotion. The cartoonish feel of the comic brings back memories of one's childhood where they used to read the carton comic strips out of the paper. The history being told about a terrible time in history is being told here and this is a story not only about that time in history but how a family survived through this time. Some of this family surviving together and making it through the worst just to be able to have the best life possible for the future of the family. All of this is told in a short few pages and is a whole different aspect when joined with a comic that can rapture almost every detail one can imagine about this story, and what Valdek's had to go through for him to be sitting on that rocking chair and telling his son the story to pass down to generations on the story how a strong family beat a horrible time in history by just sticking together.

