It might appear odd to link cartoons and picture books to the Holocaust. The medium of the picture is often used to mock, trivialise or to dumb-down an event or issue. However, the children of today are a few generations away from the Holocaust, and they might feel a certain further emotional distance from it, as they do from wars or genocides in earlier times. There has, of course, been a plethora of books on and memoirs of the Holocaust, as well as conferences devoted to it and also work carried out by various organizations (such as that engendered by Steven Spielberg), but children do not attend conferences and, to generalize, apart from the besottedness with Harry Potter, they prefer not to read. This is where the picture book can come into its own. Stewig points out that picture storybooks are a pervasive part of children's early literature; the combination of the two elements of story and picture forms a stronger artistic unit than either of them could alone. This medium can continue to play a role in encouraging children to read and vicariously experience the Holocaust, as shown in the prime example: ‘Maus’ by Art Spiegelman, a child of Holocaust survivors. At first glance, indeed at first thought, the idea of animals portraying both the victims (mice) and the perpetrators (cats) of the Holocaust sounds literary, theological and historical anathema. However, Spiegelman succeeds in holding the reader's interest and compassion without lessening the gravity and trauma of events and experience. In his book, Spiegelman depicts the tribulations of his father Vladek, as the son tries to understand and come to terms with the survivor’s life prior to, during and after the Holocaust. ‘Maus’ ties together two powerful stories: Vladek's harrowing tale of survival, against all odds, delineating the paradox of daily life in the death camps of Europe and the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father in the United States of America.

In other words, this is not Mickey Mouse or Tom and Jerry; this is a book filled with psychological insight and historical fact, as well as being a report on the personal physical and emotional journeys of one man who emblematizes many of the lives of those who died in as well as who survived the Holocaust.

The story sways from horror to occasional comedy, from stereotyping to individuality, from compassion to irritation, from magnanimity to pettiness. The drawings are skilled and slight strokes of the pen show changes in mood; the words are written, rather than in typed font, giving the impression that everything is, in effect, a diary. And that is what it is: a memoir that all readers, be they adults or children, can relate to. It is a historical as well as a personal
document that can stimulate interest in and understanding of the Holocaust and all groups involved in it. Therefore, the cartoon or picture book here is less in line with the derivation of ‘cartoon’ from the Italian and French meaning "pasteboard" and its idea of quick and ephemeral drawing; it is more akin to the similar Ancient Hebrew word, implying an engraving. This is what picture books with their cartoons and, especially, what ‘Maus’ do: they engrave the Holocaust on the minds of readers, both the older and the younger, with understanding and compassion.

As soon as a genre becomes readily identifiable by its thematic content, linguistic discourse and compositional structure, it begins to lose its communicative efficacy. Its predictability diminishes its capacity to present familiar material in a way that will both engage audience attention and represent the genre's characteristic themes with some element of freshness and originality. Over time, novel and film genres have both shown a propensity to use comedic modes – for example, spoof, farce or metafictive humour – to breathe fresh life into a genre that is beginning to ossify. Such a comedic mode might eventually become a sub-genre, as seems to have happened with contemporary horror films, or it can nudge a genre into new directions. This paper will consider three examples of YA coming-of-age narrative whose originality to a great extent lies in their comic interrogation of their genre: two epistolary novels, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) and Jaclyn Moriarty's Feeling Sorry for Celia (2000), and Don Roos's film The Opposite of Sex (1998). All three texts overtly interrogate the parallels between the narrative conventions which interpellate fictive characters and the social conventions, such as popular media constructions of teenage experience, which interpellate young people in the actual world. Mocking the genre thus enables forms of witty social comment, as well as indicating the emergence of a new sub-genre.

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