The Maus Fanlisting
About Art Spiegelman's Maus
When Art Spiegelman wanted to tell the story of what his
father, Vladek, went through during the Holocaust, he wanted to
do so in comic book format
as it's the media with which he is most familiar.
In Maus, Spiegelman portrays
the characters as animals. The Jews are mice and the Germans are cats.
That might sound silly, but the metaphor actually works rather well
because it highlights the dehumanizing way the NAZIs treated the Jews.
In addition, it makes Vladek's story more digestible, but
certainly not less horrifying and emotional.
In addition to Vladek's story, Maus also
Art Spiegelman's own story. From the time he was a child, he had a
difficult time relating ot his father and writing Maus
was a daunting task. To make sure his book was true to what his
father remembered, Art interviewed his father on many occasions. As
work on it progressed, he realized that it was nearly impossible for
him to make sense of the Holocaust when he can't even make sense out of
his relationship with his father.
The first volume of Maus, My Father Bleeds History, was
published in 1986 and the second, And
Here My Troubles Began, in 1991. Slightly different, early
versions of
both books were published serially in Raw,
a magazine that Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly,
edited. A very early, three-page (and rather funny looking) version of Maus
appeared in an underground
comic book called Funny Animals
in 1972.
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