The comic that drew Jews as mice won a Pulitzer in 1992
Art Spiegelman spent over a decade turning taped conversations with his father, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, into a comic where Jews are mice, Germans cats and Poles pigs. Maus is as much about a strained son and a difficult father as about genocide, and in 1992 it became the first graphic novel awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
The project grew from a three-page strip of 1972 that gave Spiegelman a reason to interview his father, Vladek, about the war. He started the book proper in 1978 and serialised it from 1980 to 1991 inside Raw, the avant-garde magazine he published with his wife, Francoise Mouly. A first collection of six chapters, My Father Bleeds History, appeared in 1986 and reached a mainstream audience; the second volume followed in 1991.
Two stories run side by side. In the present, set in Rego Park, Queens, in 1978 and 1979, Art visits a father he has grown apart from, now remarried to Mala, another survivor. In the past, Vladek recounts life in Poland from the mid-1930s: marrying into Anja's wealthy family in 1937, becoming a manufacturer in Sosnowiec, being captured as a soldier, hiding in ghettos and bunkers, and finally being betrayed by smugglers who promised passage to Hungary. He and Anja were deported to Auschwitz and separated until liberation. Their first son, Richieu, sent to an aunt for safety, did not survive.
Spiegelman refuses to make his father a saint. Vladek is resourceful and brave, but also stubborn, miserly and openly racist, and he confesses that he burned Anja's own wartime diaries after her death in 1968, leaving her story permanently lost. Art calls him a murderer for it. The book also turns on itself: a later chapter shows Art in 1986, paralysed by the success of the first volume, discussing with his psychiatrist, himself a survivor, whether any more stories should be told at all.
Vladek died in 1982, before the work was finished, and the final image is the couple's shared gravestone. Critics have filed Maus under memoir, biography, history and fiction without settling the question. Its minimalist drawing and inventive page layouts, together with its seriousness, made it one of the first graphic novels to attract sustained academic study in the English-speaking world.
Source: Maus
