Maus

For other uses, see Maus (disambiguation).

Maus
Cover of the first volume of Maus:
Date	1991
Page count	296 pages
Publisher	Pantheon Books
Creative team
Creators	Art Spiegelman
Original publication
Published in	RAW
Issues	Vol. 1 #2–Vol. 2 #3
Date of publication	1980–1991
ISBN	0-394-54155-3 (Vol. I) 0-394-55655-0 (Vol. II)
Chronology
Preceded by	Breakdowns
Followed by	In the Shadow of No Towers

Maus is a graphic novel completed in 1991 by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman. In it, Spiegelman interviews his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The book makes use of postmodern techniques in its presentation, most strikingly in its depiction of different races of humans as different kinds of animals, with Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs. Maus has been variously labeled as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. It was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.

The story alternates between two main timelines. In the "present" frame tale, beginning in 1978 in Rego Park, New York, Spiegelman talks with his father about his Holocaust experiences, gathering material for the Maus project he is about to begin. In the "past", Spiegelman depicts his father's experiences, starting in the years immediately leading up to World War II. Much of the story revolves around Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father, and the absence of his mother. She committed suicide when he was 20. Her grief-stricken husband destroyed her written accounts of Auschwitz. Formally, Spiegelman struggles with problems of presentation, working with a strained animal metaphor that is intended to self-destruct. Deceptively simple, the book uses a minimalist drawing style while displaying virtuosity in its page and panel layouts, pacing and structure.

The book has its roots in a three-page 1972 strip by Spiegelman, also called "Maus". The strip was the impetus for Spiegelman to interview his father about his war experiences. The recorded interviews became the basis for the later graphic novel, which was begun in earnest in 1978. Maus was serialized from 1980 until 1991 as an insert in Raw, an avant-garde comics and graphics magazine published by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly. It has been published in two-volume, single-volume, CD-ROM and DVD editions.

Maus has won numerous awards, and has been translated into dozens of languages. In the English-speaking world, it was one of the first comics works to receive the attention of schools and academics. It is credited with helping the comics medium gain respect among the public, and helped establish and popularize the concept of the graphic novel.

Overview

The book is mostly divided between the "present" frame tale, in 1978–79 in Rego Park, New York, in which Spiegelman interviews his father, Vladek; and the "past", the story that Vladek tells, beginning in the mid-1930s and continuing through the end of the Holocaust in 1945, when Vladek and his wife Anja emigrate to the US. Spiegelman has a strained relationship with his father, who harasses and infuriates his neighbors and loved ones.

Synopsis

The book opens with a scene from Spiegelman's Rego Park childhood in 1958. He runs to his father after being left behind by his friends, but his father responds in broken English, "Friends? Your friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week, then you could see what it is, friends!"

As an adult, Spiegelman visits his father, Vladek, from whom he has become estranged. Vladek has remarried to a woman called Mala since the suicide of Art's mother, Anja, in 1968. Art wants to get Vladek to recount his Holocaust experience. Vladek tells of his time in Częstochowa, describing how he came to marry into Anja's wealthy family in 1937 and move to Sosnowiec to become a manufacturer. Vladek begs Art not to include this part of the story in the book and Art reluctantly agrees. Anja suffers a mental breakdown after giving birth to their first son, Richieu, towards the end of the year. The couple go to a sanitarium in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for her to recover. After they return, political and antisemitic tensions build until Vladek is drafted just in time for the Nazi invasion. Vladek is captured at the front and put to labor as a prisoner of war. After being released, he finds Sosnowiec has been annexed by Germany, and he is released on the other side of the border in the Polish protectorate. He sneaks across the border and is reunited with his family.

File:Maus page 103 panel 2 HITLER DID IT.jpg

"Prisoner on the Hell Planet" (1973), an early, expressionistic strip about Spiegelman's mother's suicide, reprinted in Maus

During one of Art's visits, he finds that a friend of Mala's has sent them one of the underground comix magazines he had contributed to. Mala had tries to hide it, but Vladek finds and reads it. The four-page "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", reprinted in full, is a striking visual and thematic contrast with the rest of the book. Art is traumatized by his mother's suicide three months after he was released from the state mental hospital, and in the end depicts himself behind bars, saying "You murdered me, Mommy, and left me here to take the rap!"

In 1943, all Jews were ordered to move from Sosnowiec to Srodula, from where they would be marched to Sosnowiec to work. The family is split up—Richieu is sent to Zawiercie to be with his aunt, where they believed he would be safe. As the round-ups increase, and more Jews are sent from the ghettos to Auschwitz, the aunt poisons herself, her children and Richieu to escape the Gestapo. In Srodula, many Jews, including Vladek, build bunkers to hide from the German roundups. Vladek's bunker is discovered and he is placed into a "ghetto inside the ghetto", surrounded by barbed wire. Later the remnants of Vladek and Anja's family are taken away. Srodula is cleared completely of its Jews, except for a group Vladek hides with in another bunker. When the Germans finally depart, the group splits up and leaves the ghetto.

In Sosnowiec, Vladek and Anja move from one hiding place to the next, making occasional contact with other Jews in hiding. Vladek hunts for provisions disguised as a Pole. They arrange with smugglers to escape to Hungary, but it is a trick—they are arrested by the Gestapo on the train and are taken to Auschwitz, where they are separated until after the war.

Art asks after Anja's diaries, which Vladek tells him were her later account of her Holocaust experiences. They are the only way to find out what happened to her after she was separated from Vladek at Auschwitz. Vladek tells Art she had said, "I wish my son, when he grows up, he will be interested in this". Vladek comes to admit that he burned them after she killed herself. Art is enraged, and calls Vladek a "murderer".

The story jumps to 1986, after the first six chapters of Maus were collected into a single volume. Art is overcome with the unexpected attention the book receives, finding himself "totally blocked". Art talks with his psychiatrist, Paul Pavel, a Czech Holocaust survivor, about the book, who suggests that, as those who perished in the camps can never tell their stories, "maybe it's better not to have any more stories". Art replies with a quote from Samuel Beckett: "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness", but then realizes, "on the other hand, he said it".

Vladek tells of his hardships in the camps, of starvation and abuse, of avoiding the selektionen and of his resourcefulness. Though it is dangerous, Anja and Vladek occasionally are able to exchange messages. As the war progresses, and the German front is pushed back, the prisoners are marched from Auschwitz, in Poland, to Gross-Rosen within the Reich, and then to Dachau, where the hardships only increase and Vladek catches typhus.

The war ends, the camp survivors are freed, and Vladek and Anja are reunited. The book closes with Vladek turning over in his bed and telling Art, "I'm tired from talking, Richieu, and it's enough stories for now." The final image is of Vladek and Anja's tombstone—Vladek died in 1982, long before the book was completed.

Primary characters

Art Spiegelman (born 1948)

Art is a cartoonist and intellectual who has a strained relationship with his father, Vladek, who calls him "Artie". Art is presented as neurotic and obsessive, angry and full of self-pity, and feels dominated by his father. Art deals with his own traumas and those inherited from his parents by seeking psychiatric help, which continued after the book was completed.

Vladek Spiegelman (1906–1982)

Vladek is a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust and moved to New York in the early 1950s. Speaking broken English, he is presented as miserly, anal retentive, anxious and obstinate—traits that may have helped him survive the camps, but which drive his family mad. He displays racist attitudes, as when Françoise picks up a black hitchhiker, whom he fears will rob them. He shows little insight into his own racist comments about others.

Mala Spiegelman(1917–2007)

Mala is Vladek's second wife. Vladek makes her feel she can never live up to Anja. Though she too is a survivor and speaks with Art frequently throughout the book, Art makes no attempt to learn of her Holocaust experience.

Anja Spiegelman (1912–1968)

Anja is Art's mother and Vladek's first wife, also a Polish Jew who has survived the Holocaust. Nervous, compliant and clinging, she has her first nervous breakdown after giving birth to her first son. She would sometimes tell Art about the Holocaust while he was growing up, although his father did not want him to know about it. She committed suicide by slashing her wrists in a bathtub in May 1968, leaving no note.

Françoise Mouly (born 1955)

Françoise is married to Art. She is French but converted to Judaism to please Art's father. It is unclear to Spiegleman whether she should be represented as a Jewish mouse, a French frog or some other animal.

Background

Art Spiegelman was born on February 15, 1948 in Sweden following World War II to Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors Vladek and Anja Spiegelman. His brother Richieu had been poisoned by an aunt in order to avoid capture by the Nazis four years before Art's birth. He immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1951. Growing up, his mother would occasionally talk about Auschwitz, but his father did not want him to know about it.

Spiegelman developed an early interest in comics and began drawing professionally at 16. He spent a month in Binghamton State Mental Hospital in 1968 after a nervous breakdown. Shortly after getting out, his mother committed suicide. His father was not happy with his involvement in the hippie movement and when he bought a German Volkswagen, it damaged their already-strained relationship "beyond repair". Around this time Spiegelman had been reading in fanzines about graphic artists such as Frans Masereel, who had made wordless novels. The discussions in those fanzines about making the great American novel in comics would later inspire him.

File:Art Spiegelman - Maus (1972) page 1 panel 3.jpg

From the original, less subtle 1972 "Maus" strip

Spiegelman became a key figure in the underground comix movement of the 1970s, both as cartoonist and editor. In 1972 he was asked to do a three-page strip for the first issue of Funny Aminals [sic]. He wanted to do one about racism, and at first considered focusing on African Americans, with cats taking on the role of the Ku Klux Klan chasing African-American mice. Instead, he turned to the Holocaust. The strip was called "Maus" and depicted Jews as mice persecuted by die Katzen—Nazis depicted as cats. The tale was narrated to a mouse named "Mickey". Spiegelman was encouraged to contribute the piece by Funny Aminals editor Justin Green, who had produced the semi-autobiographical Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, a seminal work which inspired other underground cartoonists to take the lid off their psyches and produce more personal, revealing work. Spiegelman stated, "without Binky Brown, there would be no Maus". After finishing the strip, Spiegelman visited his father to show him the finished work, which had been partially based an an anecdote he had heard about his father's Auschwitz experience. His father gave him further background on the story, which piqued Spiegelman's interest to learn more. Spiegelman did a series of taped interviews over four days with his father, providing the basis of the longer Maus. Spiegelman followed up with extensive research, reading survivors' accounts and talking to friends and family who also survived. One "really important" source for him was a series of Polish pamphlets published after the war detailing what happened to the Jews by region, from which he was able to get very detailed information about Sosnowiec.

In 1973, he produced a strip for Short Order Comix #1 called "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" about his mother's suicide. The same year, he edited an explicitly pornographic and psychedelic book of quotations, which he dedicated to her.

Spiegelman visited Auschwitz in 1979 as part of his researches

He spent the rest of the 1970s building his reputation making short, avant-garde comics. He moved back to New York from San Francisco in 1975, which he admitted to his father only in 1977, by which time he had decided he wanted to work on a "very long comic book". He began another series interviews with his father in 1978, and visited Auschwitz in 1979. The story was serialized in a new comics and graphics magazine he and Françoise had begun in 1980 called Raw.

Comics medium

American comic books, which had been big business and flourished in diverse genres in the 1940s and 1950s, had reached a low ebb in the 1970s. By the time Maus started to be serialized, the "Big Two" comics publishers, Marvel and DC Comics, dominated the industry with mostly superhero titles. The underground comix movement that had flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s also seemed moribund. The public perception of comic books was of adolescent power fantasies, inherently incapable of mature artistic or literary expression. Comics was seen as a genre rather than a medium.

Maus came to prominence when the term "graphic novel" was beginning to gain currency. The term was first popularized by Will Eisner with the publication of A Contract with God in 1978. It was used partly to mask the culturally low status that comics had in the English-speaking world, and partly because the term "comic book" was being used to refer to short-form periodicals, awkwardly leaving no accepted vocabulary with which to talk about book-form comics.

Publication

The first chapter of Maus appeared in December 1980 in the second issue of Raw. A new chapter of the story appeared in every issue as a small insert in the oversized magazine until it came to an end in 1991. Every chapter except the last appeared in Raw.

Spiegelman struggled to find a publisher for Maus, but in 1986, the first six chapters were collected by Pantheon into a book, after a rave New York Times review of the work-in-progress. The volume was titled Maus: A Survivor's Tale and subtitled My Father Bleeds History. Spiegelman said he was eager to have the book come out early, even if incomplete, in order to avoid comparisons with the animated film An American Tail from Stephen Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, which he believed was inspired by Maus.

The book was difficult not only for critics and reviewers to classify, but also for booksellers, who needed to know on which shelves to place it. Pantheon pushed for the term "graphic novel". Spiegelman was not comfortable with the term, however, as many book-length comics were being referred to as "graphic novels" whether or not they were novelistic. He also suspected the term was being used in an attempt to validate the comics form, rather than to describe the contents of the books. Spiegelman later came to accept the term, and, with Drawn and Quarterly publisher Chris Oliveros, successfully lobbied the Book Industry Study Group in the early 2000s to include "graphic novel" as a standardized category in bookstores.

The last five chapters were collected in 1991 in the second volume, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began. The two volumes were later collected into soft- and hard-covered two-volume boxed sets and single-volume editions by Pantheon. In 1994, The Voyager Company released The Complete Maus on CD-ROM, a collection which, in addition to the original comics, contained Vladek's taped transcripts, filmed interviews with Art, sketches and other background material. The CD-ROM was based on HyperCard, a now-obsolete Macintosh-only application. In 2011 Pantheon Books published a companion to The Complete Maus entitled MetaMAUS, with further background material, including filmed footage of Vladek. The centerpiece of the book is an extensive Spiegelman interview conducted by Hillary Chute, as well as interviews with his wife and children, sketches, photographs, family trees, assorted artwork and a DVD with video, audio, photos and an interactive version of Maus.

The book is dedicated to Spiegelman's brother, Richieu, who died during the Holocaust and whom he had never met, and Spiegelman's first daughter, Nadja. A photograph of Spiegelman's brother also prefaces the book. Its epigraph was a quote from Adolf Hitler: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human".

International publication

The initial volume's Commonwealth rights were licensed to Penguin Books in 1986, with the exception of South Africa. Spiegelman refused to "compromise with fascism" by allowing his work to be published there, in support of the African National Congress's cultural boycott in opposition to apartheid.

As of 2011, Maus had been translated into some thirty languages. Three translations were particularly important to Spiegelman: French, as his wife was French, and because of his respect for the sophisticated comics tradition there; German, given the book's focus; and Polish. Poland was the location of the majority of the book, and Polish was the language of his parents and, he says, was his own mother tongue in infancy. The German reception was positive—Maus was a best-seller, and found its way into many classrooms. The Polish translation encountered difficulties. As early as 1987, when he planned a research visit to Poland, he was questioned about the Poles being depicted as pigs by a Polish consulate official who had approved Spiegelman's visa. He was made to understand that, in Poland, calling someone a swine was a much stronger insult than in the US. Publishers and commentators since then had refused to touch the book for fear of protests and boycotts. Maus was finally published in Polish in 2001 by Piotr Bikont, a journalist for Gazeta Wyborcza, who set up his own publishing house for that purpose. A demonstration was planned to protest Maus' publication, and the book was burned in front of Gazeta's offices. Bikont's response was to don a pig mask and wave to the protesters from the office windows. The Japanese translation was printed at about the size of a magazine, and is the only authorized larger edition.

For the Hebrew edition of Maus, a few panels were changed. Based on Vladek's memory, one of the minor characters was portrayed as a member of the Nazi-installed "Jewish Police". An Israeli descendant objected and threatened to sue for libel. Spiegelman redrew the character with a fedora in place of his original police hat, but appended a note to the volume voicing his objection to this "intrusion". This version of the first volume of the book, published by Zmora Bitan in 1990, was indifferently or negatively received, and the publisher opted not to release the second volume. Another Israeli publisher published both volumes, with a new translation that included Vladek's broken language, which Zmora Bitan had refused to do. This may have highlighted a difference between the self-images of Israeli and American Jews—the image of the resistance fighter in contrast to the timid and weak diaspora Jew, a perceived self-hatred that one Israeli writer called "the diaspora sickness". For years, plans have been made for an Arabic translation, but it has yet to appear due to complicated Arab–Jewish relations in the Middle East.

Themes

Presentation

Drawing on left of character as a mouse, on the right the same character as a cat. Art cannot decide which animal should be used to depict the character, who may have been a German, or may have been a Jew.

Spiegelman finds the animal metaphor self-destructs

Spiegelman takes a postmodern approach, portraying different races as different species of animals—the Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and ethnic Poles as pigs, among others. Spiegelman took advantage of the way Nazi propaganda films had depicted Jews as rats and vermin, though he first was struck by the metaphor after attending a presentation by Ken Jacobs in which films of minstrel shows were shown alongside early American animated films, abundant with racial caricatures.

Maus "feeds on itself", telling the story of how the "inner" story was made. It examines the choices Spiegelman made in the retelling of his father's memories, and the artistic choices he had to make—for example, when his French wife converts to Judaism, Spiegelman frets over whether should she be depicted as a frog or a mouse. Jewish characters try to pass themselves off as ethnic Poles by tying pig masks to their faces, with the strings showing at the back. Vladek's disguise was more convincing than Anja's—"you could see she was more Jewish", Vladek says. Art renders this Jewishness by having her tail hang out of her disguise. This literalization of the genocidal stereotypes that drove the Nazis to their Final Solution may risk reinforcing racist labels, but Spiegelman uses the idea to create anonymity for the characters. This anonymity may paradoxically enable the reader to identify with the characters as human, preventing the reader from observing racial characteristics based on facial traits, while reminding readers that racist classification is ever present.

In making people of a single nationality look "all alike", Spiegelman hoped to show the absurdity of dividing people along such lines. In a 1991 interview, Spiegelman noted that "these metaphors...are meant to self-destruct in my book—and I think they do self-destruct". Professor Amy Hungerford saw no consistent system to the animal metaphor. Rather, it signified the characters' roles in the story rather than their races—the gentile Françoise is a mouse because of her identification with her husband, who identifies with the Holocaust victims. When asked what animal he would make Israeli Jews, Spiegelman suggests porcupines. When Art visits his psychiatrist, the two wear mouse masks instead of having mouse heads. Spiegelman's own perceptions of the animal metaphor seem to have evolved over the book's making—in the original publication of the first volume, his self-portrait showed a mouse head on a human body, but by the time the second volume arrived in print, his self-portrait had become a man wearing a mouse mask. In Maus, the characters seem to be mice and cats only in their predator/prey relationship. In every respect other than the heads, they act and speak as ordinary humans.

Spiegelman, like many of his critics, worries that "[r]eality is too much for comics...so much has to be left out or distorted", admitting that his presentation of the story may not be accurate. Additionally, as he had not lived in the camps himself, he found it difficult to understand or visualize this "separate universe" to depict it.

Memory

To Marianne Hirsch, Spiegelman's life is "dominated by memories that are not his own". His work is one not of memory but of postmemory—a term she coined after encountering Maus. This describes the relation of the children of survivors with the survivors. While these children did not have their parents' experiences, they grow up with their parents' memories—the memory of another's memory—until the stories become so powerful that for these children they become memories in their own right. The children's proximity creates a "deep personal connection" with the memory, though separated from it by "generational distance".

Art tried to keep his father's story chronological, because otherwise he would "never keep it straight". His mother Anja's memories are conspicuously absent from the narrative, given her suicide and Vladek's destruction of her diaries. Hirsch sees Maus in part as an attempt to reconstruct her memory. Vladek keeps her memory alive with the pictures on his desk, "like a shrine", according to Mala.

Guilt

Spiegelman displays his sense of guilt in many ways. He anguishes over his dead brother, Richieu, who perished in the Holocaust, and whom he feels he can never live up to. The eighth chapter, made after the publication and unexpected success of the first volume, opens with a guilt-ridden Spiegelman (now in human form, with a strapped-on mouse mask) atop a pile of corpses—the corpses of the six million Jews upon whom Maus's success was built. He is told by his psychiatrist that his father feels guilt for having survived and for outliving his first son, and that some of Art's guilt may spring from painting his father in such an unflattering way. He also feels inadequate in portraying the Holocaust, as he had not experienced it first hand.

Racism

Aside from the Nazis' vision of racial divisions that Spiegelman parodies, Vladek's own racism is put on display, as when he becomes upset that Françoise would pick up a black hitchhiker, a "schwartser" in his words. When he, victim of antisemitism, is berated by her for his racist attitudes, he replies, "It's not even to compare, the schwartsers and the Jews!" Spiegelman gradually deconstructs the animal metaphor throughout the book, especially in the second volume, showing where the lines cannot be drawn between races of humans.

The Germans are depicted with little difference between them, but there is great variety and little stereotyping of the Poles and Jews who dominate the story. Sometimes Jews and the Jewish councils themselves are shown to comply with the occupiers. Some trick other Jews into capture, while others act as police for the Nazis.

While the Poles have often been demonized for perceived antisemitism and complicity with the Nazis, Spiegelman shows numerous instances of Poles who risked themselves to aid Jews. However, antisemitism is depicted as being rife. The Kapos who run the camps are Poles, while Anja and Vladek are tricked by Polish smugglers into the clutches of the Nazis. Anja and Vladek hear stories that Poles continue to drive off and even kill returning Jews after the war.

Language

Vladek's knowledge of English helps him initiate his first contact with Anja, and also helps him out several times during the story. His English, the language in which he recounts his story, however, is broken, highlighted by the contrast with Art's therapist, Paul Pavel, who is also an immigrant and Holocaust survivor. He makes friends with a Frenchman via his English, and the two continue to correspond in English after the war. His recounting of the Holocaust, first to American soldiers, then to his son, is never in his mother tongue, and English becomes his daily language when he moves to America. His difficulty with his second language is revealed as Art writes his dialogue in broken English, as when Vladek is imprisoned and tells Art, "...every day we prayed...I was very religious, and it wasn't else to do". In an instance late in the book, Vladek talks of Dachau, saying, "And here[...]my troubles began", though clearly his troubles had begun long before Dachau. This unidiomatic expression was emphasized when Art used it as the subtitle of the second volume.

The German word maus is cognate to the English word "mouse", but also reminiscent of the German word mauscheln, meaning "to speak like a Jew" and referring to the particular way Jews spoke German—a word not etymologically related to maus, but distantly to Moses.

Style

Spiegelman's perceived audacity in using the Holocaust as his subject was compounded by his using comics to tell the story. The medium itself was viewed in the English-speaking world as being inherently trivial, thus trivializing and degrading the subject matter, especially as he used animal heads in place of recognizably human ones. Funny animals have been a staple of comics, and while they have traditionally been thought of as being for children, the underground had long made use of them for adult stories, notably in Robert Crumb's work (such as Fritz the Cat) which showed that the genre could "open up the way to a paradoxical narrative realism" that Maus would exploit.

Ostensibly about the Holocaust, the story becomes sublimated by the frame tale of Art interviewing and interacting with his father. Art's "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" is also encompassed by the frame. It depicts all the characters in human form in a surreal, German Expressionist woodcut style inspired by Lynd Ward.

The line between the frame and the world is bolded by comments such as when Spiegelman, neurotically trying to deal with what Maus is becoming for him, says to his wife, "You'd never let me do so much talking without interrupting if this were real life". When a prisoner who is believed by the Nazis to be a Jew claims to be German, Spiegelman is confronted with the difficulty of whether to present this character as a cat or a mouse. Throughout the book, Spiegelman incorporates and highlights banal details from his father's tales, sometimes humorous or ironic, giving a lightness and humanity to the story which "helps carry the weight of the unbearable historical realities".

Spiegelman started taking down his interviews of Vladek on paper, but quickly switched to a tape recorder, in person or over the phone. Spiegelman often condensed Vladek's words, but occasionally would add to the dialogue, or synthesize multiple retellings into a single portrayal.

Spiegelman worried about the effect his organizing of Vladek's story would have on its authenticity. In the end, he eschewed a more Joycean approach and settled on a linear narrative he thought would be better at "getting things across". He also strove to present how the book was recorded and organized as an important part of the book itself, expressing the "sense of an interview shaped by a relationship".

Artwork

The story is text-driven, with few wordless panels out of its 1,500 black-and-white drawings. In the "present" portions, the pages are arranged in eight-panel grids, but in the "past" sections, Spiegelman found himself "violating the grid constantly" with many unique page layouts.

The original 3-page "Maus" and "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" were done in highly detailed, expressive styles. Spiegelman initially thought to draw Maus in such a sophisticated manner, but after initial sketches decided it would be more appropriate to use a pared-down style, one little removed from his pencil sketches, which would be more direct and immediate. Characters are rendered in a minimalist way, with dots for eyes and slashes for eyebrows and mouths, looking "as if they were human beings with animal heads pasted on them". Spiegelman wanted to get away from the rendering of the characters in the original "Maus", in which oversized cats towered over the Jewish mice, an approach which Spiegelman says, "tells you how to feel, tells you how to think"—he would prefer the reader to make independent moral judgments. The cat-Nazis are drawn in proportions no different from those of the mouse-Jews, and the stereotypical villainous expressions are also dropped.

The contrast between the artwork in "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" and Maus drives home the effectiveness of the simpler artwork—"Prisoner" is alienating, while Maus is more inviting, encouraging deeper contemplation and understanding.

Spiegelman wanted the artwork to have a diary feel to it, and so drew the pages on stationery with a fountain pen and typewriter correction fluid. It was reproduced at the same size it was drawn, in contrast to his other work, which was normally drawn larger and shrunk down, which would hide defects in the art.

Influences

File:Frans Masereel - Passionate Journey - two pages.jpg

Wordless woodcut novels like those by Frans Masereel were an early influence.

Spiegelman is a cartoonist who is conscious of his medium's history, and published articles promoting a greater knowledge of comics' past. Chief among his early influences were Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner, and Bernard Krigstein's "Master Race". While he acknowledges Eisner's influence on his work, he denied that Eisner's first graphic novel, A Contract with God (1978), had any impact on Maus. He cited Harold Gray's comic strip Little Orphan Annie as having "influenced Maus fairly directly", and praised Gray's work for discovering a cartoon-based vocabulary (rather than illustration-based one) for telling his stories. Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) inspired Spiegelman to open up and include autobiographical elements in his comics.

Among the artists who influenced Maus, Spiegelman cited Frans Masereel, who had made an early woodcut novel called Mon Livre d'Heures (1919, titled Passionate Journey in English).

Reception and legacy

Spiegelman's work as cartoonist and editor had long been known and respected in the comics community, but the media attention after the first volume's publication in 1986 was unexpected. Hundreds of overwhelmingly positive reviews appeared, and Maus became the center of new attention focused on comics. It became one of the "Big Three" book-form comics from around 1986–1987, along with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, that are said to have brought the term "graphic novel" and the idea of comics for adults into mainstream consciousness. It was credited with changing the public's perception of what comics could be, at a time when, in the English-speaking world, they were considered to be for children, and strongly associated with superheroes. Initially, criticism of Maus showed a resistance to including comics in literary discourse, as when the New York Times "praised" the book by saying, "Art Spiegelman doesn't draw comic books", but after its Pulitzer Prize win, it gradually won greater acceptance and interest among academics. An exhibition on the making of Maus was staged at the Museum of Modern Art in 1992.

The genre of Maus proved difficult to classify. It has been called biography, fiction, autobiography, history, and memoir. Spiegelman petitioned the New York Times to move it from "fiction" to "non-fiction" on their bestseller list, saying, "I shudder to think how David Duke...would respond to seeing a carefully researched work based closely on my father's memories of life in Hitler's Europe and in the death camps classified as fiction". One editor responded, "Let's go out to Spiegelman's house and if a giant mouse answers the door, we'll move it to the nonfiction side of the list!" The Times eventually acquiesced. The Pulitzer committee sidestepped the issue by giving the completed Maus a Special Award in Letters in 1992.

Maus ranked highly on comics and literature lists. The Comics Journal called it the fourth greatest comics work of the 20th Century, and Wizard placed it first on their list of 100 Greatest Graphic Novels; Entertainment Weekly listed Maus as #7 on their list of The New Classics: Books – The 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008; and Time put Maus at seventh place on their list of best non-fiction books from between 1923 and 2005, and fourth on their list of top graphic novels. Praise for the book also came from contemporaries such as Jules Feiffer, and literary writers such as Umberto Eco. Spiegelman turned down numerous offers to have Maus adapted for film or television.

Early instalments of Maus that appeared in Raw inspired the young Chris Ware to "try to do comics that had a 'serious' tone to them", and it is cited as a primary influence on graphic novels such as Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.

Criticism

A "cottage industry" of academic research built up around Maus, and it has frequently been used as course material in schools in a range of courses: history, dysfunctional family psychology, language arts and social studies. The volume of academic work done on Maus far surpasses that of any other comics work. One of the earliest was Joshua Brown's 1988 "Of Mice and Memory" from the Oral History Review, which deals with the problems Spiegelman faced in presenting his father's story. Marianne Hirsch wrote an influential essay on post-memory called "Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory", later expanded into a book called Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Academics far outside the field of comics such as Dominick LaCapra, Linda Hutcheon and Terrence Des Pres took part in the discourse, although few approached Maus who were familiar with comics, largely because of the lack of an academic comics tradition—Maus tended to be approached as Holocaust history or from a film or literary perspective. In 2003, Deborah Geis edited a collection of essays on Maus called Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust. Maus is considered an important work of Holocaust literature, and studies of it have made significant contributions to Holocaust studies.

Some Holocaust survivors objected to Spiegelman making a comic book out of their tragedy. Literary critics such as Hillel Halkin objected that the animal metaphor was "doubly dehumanizing", reinforcing the Nazi belief that the atrocities were perpetrated by one species on another, when they were actually done by humans against humans. Harvey Pekar and others saw Spiegelman's use of animals as potentially reinforcing stereotypes. Pekar was also disdainful of Spiegelman's overwhelmingly negative portrayal of his father, calling him disingenuous and hypocritical for his portrayal in a book that presents itself as objective. Comics critic R. C. Harvey argued that Spiegelman's animal metaphor threatened "to erode [Maus's] moral underpinnings", and played "directly into [the Nazis'] racist vision".

Some commentators, such as Peter Obst and Lawrence Weschler, expressed concern over the Poles' depiction as pigs—a much greater insult in Polish culture than in American culture. Pigs, and pork, are also viewed as being non-kosher, or unclean, in Jewish culture—a point that was unlikely to be lost on the Jewish Spiegelman. Critics such as Obst and Harvey Pekar have said that the portrayal of Poles is unbalanced—that, while some Poles are seen as helping Jews, they often shown do so for self-serving reasons.

Literary critic Walter Ben Michaels found Spiegelman's racial divisions "counterfactual". Spiegelman depicts the various European races as different animal species, but Americans, both black and white, as dogs—with the exception of the Jews, who remain unassimilated mice. To Michaels, Maus seems to gloss over the racial inequality that has plagued the history of the U.S.

Other critics objected to what they saw as the work's fatalism. French-language Belgian publisher La Cinquième Couche anonymously produced a book called Katz, a remix of Spiegelman's book with all animal heads replaced with cat heads. The book reproduced every page and line of dialogue from Maus. Spiegelman's French publisher, Flammarion, forced the publisher to destroy all copies, under charges of copyright violation.

Awards and nominations

Year	Organisation	Award	Result
1986	National Book Critics Circle	National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography	Nominated
1987	Present Tense magazine American Jewish Committee	Present Tense/Joel H. Cavior Book Award for Fiction	Won
1988	Angoulême International Comics Festival Awards	Religious Award: Christian Testimony	Won
		Best Foreign Album (Maus: un survivant raconte)	Won
	Urhunden Prize	Foreign Album	Won
1990	Max & Moritz Prizes	Special Prize	Won
1991	National Book Critics Circle	National Book Critics Circle Award	Nominated
1992	Pulitzer Prize	Special Awards and Citations – Letters	Won
	Eisner Award	Best Graphic Album—Reprint (Maus II).	Won
	Harvey Award	Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Material (Maus II)	Won
	Los Angeles Times	Book Prize for Fiction (Maus II)	Won
1993	Angoulême International Comics Festival Awards	Best Foreign Album (Maus: un survivant raconte II)	Won
	Urhunden Prize	Foreign Album (Maus II)	Won
2012	Eisner Award	Best Comics-Related Book (MetaMaus)	Won

See also

• Anthropomorphism
• Birds' Head Haggadah
• Caricature
• Stereotypes of Jews in literature

References

Works cited

Books

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Ahrens, Jörn; Meteling, Arno (2010). Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture, and Sequence. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-8264-4019-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Ball, David M.; Kuhlman, Martha B. (2010). The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-60473-442-3. Retrieved 2012-06-13. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Berger, James (1999). After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-2932-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Chute, Hillary L. (2010). Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-15062-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Duncan, Randy; Smith, Matthew J (2009). The Power of Comics. Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-8264-2936-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Fagan, Bryan D.; Fagan, Jody Condit (2011). "Medium or Genre?". Comic Book Collections for Libraries. ABC-CLIO. p. 3. ISBN 978-1-59884-511-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Fathers, Michael (2007). "Art Mimics Life in the Death Camps". In Witek, Joseph (ed.). Art Spiegelman: Conversations. University Press of Mississippi. pp. 122–125. ISBN 978-1-934110-12-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) (Originally in Independent on Sunday on 22 March 1992)

Fischer, Heinz Dietrich; Fischer, Erika J. (2002). "Spiegelman, Art". Complete Biographical Encyclopedia of Pulitzer Prize Winners, 1917–2000: Journalists, Writers and Composers on Their Ways to the Coveted Awards. Walter de Gruyter. p. 230. ISBN 978-3-598-30186-5. Retrieved 2012-07-05. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Harvey, R. C. (1996). The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-0-87805-758-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

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Hignite, Todd (2007). "Art Spiegelman". In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists. Yale University Press. pp. 40–61. ISBN 978-0-300-13387-5. Retrieved 2012-06-12. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Hirsch, Marianne (1997). Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-29265-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Horowitz, Sara R. (1997). "Art Spiegelman". In Shatzky, Joel; Taub, Michael (eds.). Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 400–408. ISBN 978-0-313-29462-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

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LaCapra, Dominick (1998). "'Twas the Night Before Christmas: Art Spiegelman's Maus". History and Memory After Auschwitz. Cornell University Press. pp. 139–179. ISBN 978-0-8014-8496-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Levine, Michael G. (2006). The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-5555-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

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Mandel, Naomi (2006). "The Story of my Death: Night, Maus, Shoah and the Image of the Speaking Corpse". Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America. University of Virginia Press. pp. 99–130. ISBN 978-0-8139-2581-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Meskin, Aaron; Cook, Roy T., eds. (2012). The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4443-3464-7.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Monnin, Katie (2010). Teaching Graphic Novels: Practical Strategies for the Secondary ELA Classroom. Maupin House Publishing, Inc. p. 121. ISBN 978-1-934338-40-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Orbán, Katalin (2005). "Mauschwitz". Ethical Diversions: The Post-Holocaust Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo, and Spiegelman. Routledge. pp. 35–74. ISBN 978-0-415-97167-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Wirth-Nesher, Hana (2006). Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature. Princeton University Press. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Petersen, Robert (2010). Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narratives. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-0-313-36330-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Pustz, Matthew J (2007). "I Gave It All Up to Draw Comics: Autobiographical (And Other) Tales About Creating Comic Books". In Klaehn, Jeffery (ed.). Inside the World of Comic Books. Black Rose Books. pp. 61–81. ISBN 978-1-55164-296-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Reibmann, James E. (2001). "Fredric Wertham, Spiegelman's Maus, and Representations of the Holocaust". In Baetens, Jan (ed.). The Graphic Novel. Leuven University Press. pp. 23–30. ISBN 978-90-5867-109-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Reizbaum, Marilyn (2000). Silberstein, Laurence Jay (ed.). Mapping Jewish Identities. NYU Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-9769-3. Retrieved 2012-05-18. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Rhoades, Shirrel (2008). Comic Books: How the Industry Works. Peter Lang. ISBN 978-0-8204-8892-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Rice, Maria J. (2007). Migrations of Memory: Postmemory in Twentieth Century Ethnic American Women's Literature. ProQuest. ISBN 978-0-549-69539-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Rosen, Alan Charles (2005). Sounds of Defiance: the Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-3962-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Rothberg, Michael (2000). Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-3459-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Russell, Vanessa (2008). "The Mild-Mannered Reporter: How Clark Kent Surpassed Superman". In Ndalianis, Angela (ed.). The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. Taylor & Francis. pp. 216–232. ISBN 978-0-415-99176-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Sabin, Roger (1993). Adult Comics: An Introduction. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-415-04419-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Schwab, Gabriele (2010). Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. Columbia University Press. p. 37. ISBN 978-0-231-15257-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Schuldiner, Michael (2011). "The Second-Generation Holocaust Nonsurvivor: Third-Degree Metalepsis and Creative Block in Art Spiegelman's Maus". In Royal, Derek Parker (ed.). Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative. Purdue University Press. pp. 69–80. ISBN 978-1-55753-584-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Smith, Graham (2007). "From Mickey to Maus: Recalling the Genocide Through Cartoon". In Witek, Joseph (ed.). Art Spiegelman: Conversations. University Press of Mississippi. pp. 84–94. ISBN 978-1-934110-12-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) (Originally in Oral History Journal Vol. 15, Spring 1987)

Spiegelman, Art (2011). Chute, Hillary (ed.). MetaMAUS. Viking Press. ISBN 978-0-670-91683-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Stringer, Jenny, ed. (1996). "Graphic novel". The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English. Oxford University Press. p. 262. ISBN 978-0-19-212271-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Tan, Ed (2001). "The Telling Face in Comic Strip and Graphic Novel". In Baetens, Jan (ed.). The Graphic Novel. Leuven University Press. pp. 31–46. ISBN 978-90-5867-109-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Wood, Monica (1997). "Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Volumes I and II, by Art Spiegelman". 12 Multicultural Novels: Reading and Teacher Strategies. Walch Publishing. pp. 81–94. ISBN 978-0-8251-2901-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Weine, Stevan J. (2006). Testimony After Catastrophe: Narrating the Traumas of Political Violence. Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0-8101-2300-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Weiner, Stephen (2003). Faster than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel. NBM. ISBN 978-1-56163-368-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Williams, Paul; Lyons, James (2010). The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-60473-792-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Witek, Joseph (1989). Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-0-87805-406-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Young, James E. (2006). "The Arts of Jewish Memory in a Postmodern Age". In Rüsen, Jörn (ed.). Meaning and Representation in History. Berghahn Books. pp. 239–254. ISBN 978-1-57181-776-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Journals

Bolhafner, J. Stephen (1991). "Art for Art's Sake". The Comics Journal. 145. Fantagraphics: 96–99. ISSN 0194-7869. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |journal= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Brown, Joshua (1988). "Of Mice and Memory". Oral History Review (Spring). Oral History Association: 91–109. ISSN 0094-0798. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Frahm, Ole (2004). "Considering MAUS. Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust by Deborah R. Geis (ed.)". Image & Narrative (8). ISSN 1780-678X. Retrieved 2012-01-30. {{cite journal}}: External link in |journal= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Gordon, Andrew (2004). "Jewish Fathers and Sons in Spiegelman's Maus and Roth's Patrimony". ImageText. 1 (Spring). ISSN 1549-6732. Retrieved 2012-02-01. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Jannequin, Jean-Paul (1990). "Druillet and Spiegelman Take Grand Prizes". The Comics Journal (121). Fantagraphics: 19. ISSN 0194-7869. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Kannenberg, Gene, Jr. (1999). Groth, Gary (ed.). "No. 4: Maus". The Comics Journal (210). Fantagraphics. ISSN 0194-7869. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

Merino, Ana (2010). "Memory in Comics: Testimonial, Autobiographical and Historical Space in Maus". TransAtlantica. 2010 (1). ISSN 1765-2766. Retrieved 2012-02-01. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Pekar, Harvey (1986). "Maus and Other Topics". The Comics Journal (113). Fantagraphics: 54–57. ISSN 0194-7869. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Pekar, Harvey (1990). "Blood and Thunder". The Comics Journal (135). Fantagraphics: 27–34. ISSN 0194-7869. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Weschler, Lawrence (2001). "Pig Perplex". Lingua Franca. 11 (5). Retrieved 2012-05-15. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Witek, Joseph (2004). "Imagetext, or, Why Art Spiegelman Doesn't Draw Comics". ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 1 (1). University of Florida. ISSN 1549-6732. Retrieved 2012-04-16. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Wizard staff (2009). "100 Greatest Graphic Novels of our Lifetime". Wizard (212). Wizard Entertainment. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Newspapers

Couvreur, Daniel (2012-03-05). "Katz a-t-il défiguré Maus ?". Le Soir (in French). Retrieved 2012-06-15.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Garner, Dwight (2011-10-12). "After a Quarter-Century, an Author Looks Back at His Holocaust Comic". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-06-12.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Franklin, Ruth (2011-10-05). "Art Spiegelman's Genre-Defying Holocaust Work, Revisited". The New Republic. Retrieved 2012-01-30. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |newspaper= (help)

Langer, Lawrence L (1998-12-06). "A Fable Of The Holocaust". Retrieved 2012-08-28. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |newspaperer= ignored (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

McGrath, Charles (2004-07-11). "Not Funnies (page 2)". New York Times. Retrieved 2012-06-07. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

New York Times staff (1987-03-11). "Awards for Books With Jewish Themes". New York Times. Retrieved 2012-01-30.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Kois, Dan (2011-12-02). "The Making of 'Maus'". New York Times. Retrieved 2012-01-27.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Websites

Beaty, Bart (2012-03-07). "Conversational Euro-Comics: Bart Beaty On Katz". The Comics Reporter. Retrieved 2012-04-17. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Blau, Rosie (2008-11-29). "Breakfast with the FT: Art Spiegelman". Financial Times. Retrieved 2012-04-18. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Colbert, James (1992-11-08). "Times Book Prizes 1992 : Fiction : On Maus II". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2012-01-31. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Comic Salon staff (2012). "Nominierungen/Preisträger seit 1984" (in German). Comic Salon. Retrieved 2012-01-31. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Conan, Neal (2011-10-05). "'MetaMaus': The Story Behind Spiegelman's Classic". National Public Radio. Retrieved 2012-05-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Eisner Awards staff (2012). "Complete List of Eisner Award Winners". San Diego Comic-Con International. Retrieved 2012-01-31.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Entertainment Weekly staff (2008-06-27). "The New Classics: Books". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved 2012-01-27. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Grossman, Lev (2009-03-06). "Top Ten Graphic Novels: Maus". Time. Retrieved 2012-04-16. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Hammarlund, Ola (2007-08-08). "Urhunden: Satir och iransk kvinnoskildring får seriepris" (in Swedish). Urhunden. Retrieved 2012-04-27.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Harvey Awards staff (1992). "1992 Harvey Award Winners". Harvey Awards. Retrieved 2012-01-31.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Johnston, Ian (2001-12-28). "On Spiegelman's Maus I and II". Vancouver Island University. Retrieved 2012-02-29.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Morman, Todd (2003-01-29). "High Art, Hit Movies and Manifestos". IndyWeek.com. Retrieved 2012-06-07. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Mozzocco, J. Caleb (2011-12-01). "Balloonless | Art Spiegelman and Hillary Chute's MetaMaus". Comic Book Resources. Retrieved 2012-05-18.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

National Book Critics Circle staff (2012). "All Past National Book Critics Circle Award Winners and Finalists". National Book Critics Circle. Retrieved 2012-01-31.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Obst, Peter. "A Commentary on Maus by Art Spiegelman". American Council for Polish Culture. Retrieved 2012-05-16.

Silver, Alexandra (2011-08-30). "All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books: Maus". Time. Retrieved 2012-04-16. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Spurgeon, Tom (2012-07-14). "The Comics Reporter". The Comics Reporter. Retrieved 2012-07-15. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Park, Hye Su (2011-01-01). "Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale: A Bibliographic Essay". Shofar. Retrieved 2012-03-01. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Pulitzer Prize staff (2012). "Special Awards and Citations". Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2012-01-31.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Tout en BD staff (1993). "Le festival BD: Le palmarès 1993" (in French). Retrieved 2012-01-31. {{cite web}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Tout en BD staff (1998). "Le festival BD: Le palmarès 1988" (in French). Retrieved 2012-01-31. {{cite web}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Tzadka, Saul (2012-02-02). "Maus: Revisited". Alondon. Retrieved 2012-05-18. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Further reading

• Ewert, Jeanne (2004). "Art Spiegelman's Maus and the Graphic Narrative". In Ryan, Marie-Laure (ed.). Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 180–193. ISBN 978-0-8032-8993-2.
• Geis, Deborah R., ed. (2007). Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's tale" of the Holocaust. University of Alabama Press. ISBN 978-0-8173-5435-0.
• Kannenberg, Eugene P. (2002). Form, Function, Fiction: Text and Image in the Comics Narratives of Winsor McCay, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware. University of Connecticut.
• McGlothlin, Erin Heather (2006). ""In Auschwitz We Didn't Wear Watches": Marking Time in Art Spiegelman's Maus". Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration. Camden House. pp. 66–90. ISBN 978-1-57113-352-6.
• Miller, Frieda (1998). Maus: A Memoir of the Holocaust : Teacher's Guide (PDF). Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. ISBN 978-1-895754-29-2.

External links

• (video) Art Spiegelman and the Making of Maus
• Teacher's guide at Random House
• Questions and Resources for Art Spiegelman's Maus college study guide with archived articles
• Art Spiegelman's MAUS: Working Through the Trauma of the Holocaust. In Responses to the Holocaust, University of Virginia
• "Teaching Resources for Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale". Buckslib.org. 2004-07-11. Retrieved 2012-01-30.
• Spiegelman, Art (1997). "Getting in Touch with My Inner Racist". Mother Jones. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)