Name: Maus: How To Design A Comic Book Page
Uploaded: 2026-03-10T17:03:22.000Z
Duration: 6 min 46 s
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Adverbs of degree

One of my favorite pages from Art Spiegelman's comics masterpiece, Maus, comes in the very first chapter.

Here, the comic, if you don't know, is about Spiegelman's father's experience in the Holocaust.

Adverbs of manner

More specifically, it's about Spiegelman's own efforts to come to grips with that experience while navigating a really strained relationship with his dad.

Maus is obsessed with this correspondence between the past and the present, and

it's a theme that Spiegelman is determined to work out visually in his comic.

Well, let's take a look at the page that I mentioned earlier, panel by panel.

In the first, Spiegelman's father, Vladek, takes his grown son Artie back up to his old bedroom after dinner so that he can do some exercise.

Already the past is signaled here with the empty bedroom of a child that's moved out.

In the second panel, we get a closer look at that room and what Vladec's done with it.

More remnants of the past, like the pennant banner from Spiegelman's college, Harper, where he studied art and philosophy.

We get our first glimpse of the exorcycle that Vlad uses to work out.

And this is where art broaches the subject of the book that we're reading now.

Notice that the bodies of both father and son are leaning at the same angle.

Spiegelman's asking his dad to open up, so he parallels his body language.

He's also equating these two men visually, and

the book will continue to compare and contrast them until the end.

In the third panel, the heads are parallel.

This time, Art's looking at a picture, but

we won't learn what it is until a few panels down.

In the fourth panel, nothing changes but Art's head, which swivels around to his father as he makes his request explicit.

And then we come to the fifth panel, which stretches the entire width of the page and has a lot going on Right away, you can see three key signifiers of the past.

The picture, the identification tattoo Vladek received at Auschwitz, and

the speech bubble where Vladek says, it would take many books, my life, and

no one wants anyway to hear such stories.

As critic Hilary Schutt notes, it's as if the past, articulated, inscribed and documented, were flanking both men closing in on them.

And of course, within this, Ardi is enclosed by his father.

In the sixth panel, we learn that the photograph is of Ardi's mother, Anja, which helps us understand the panels that came before.

In the seventh panel, we see Vladek shoe pedaling with effort on the bike, but going nowhere.

Then, in the eighth and final circular panel, we get our first window into the past, into the story within a story that will consume the book.

The different shape signals a new narrative thread, while the image of Vladic echoes the photograph that's been adapted dominant feature of the rest of the page.

So you have various moments in time simultaneously made present.

That's Art Spiegelman explaining why it's a bit unfair to do what I just did and consider the value of a panel on its own.

For Spiegelman, the basic unit of comics is the page.

Its basic function, that interplay of moments that happens when you take in several panels all at once.

In a way that's unique to comics, time is made spatial, spatial, spread out across a surface so that you can see not only how the past affects the future, but

What you learn here, that this picture is of Art's mom, Vladec's wife, who committed suicide, transforms the meaning of this.

And all it takes is a glance, the slightest movement in the eyes to access that connection.

You don't need to rewind or read back or start over again on the page.

In this sense, graphic design becomes a vital part of comic making.

As the great cartoonist Seth AKA Gregory Gallant once said, the words and pictures that make up the comics language are often described as prose and illustration combined.

A bad metaphor, poetry and graphic design seems more apt poetry for the rhythm and condensing graphic design.

Because cartooning is more about moving shapes around designing than it is about drawing.

This page of Maus is the perfect illustration of that sentiment.

In Spiegelman's book Life, his father is a towering figure.

His experience surviving the most horrifying event in history becomes the central fact in not just his life, but

That's how the trauma of the Holocaust invaded the world and how the past invades the present.

In Maus, Vladec literally invades the page and pumping away on his exorcycle.

As Shute points out, Artie's father is literally unable to move forward.

Which is why it makes sense that the past begins in the wheel of that bike.

Art Spiegelman set out to create a comic that would be re readable.

That's why he spent 13 years writing, drawing and designing Maus.

Every page is a new pattern to pick apart a new configuration of moments, past and present, words and images, father and son.

This attention to design is why Maus is often regarded as the best graphic novel ever written.

It's not that the subject matter is inherently dramatic and affecting, which it is.

It's that Spiegelman wanted to tell a story in a way that was unique to the comics medium.

To extract the truth of the Holocaust and of his family that only comics can tell.

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Okay, real quick, here's another page I really love for the way that it plays with how a comics page is normally read.

It's the point in the story when Vladek is first entering Auschwitz.

Now, everyone who reads comics knows that you're meant to go left to right, then down, then left to right again.

But here Spiegelman cleverly uses overlapping speech bubbles to pull you down the left side.

And at that point you have to read down again and that becomes a descent into the beast.