The Complete Maus - Art Spiegelman - ★★★★.¼

AUTHOR: Art Spiegelman

SERIES: Maus #1-2

GENRE: Graphic Novel.

PUBLICATION DATE: January 1, 1980.

RATING: 4.25 stars.

Based on the life of Art Spiegelman's father who was a concentration camp survivor. Art Spiegelman depicts himself interviewing his father from a period of 1980 to 1991. All that his father tells him about life as a Jew in the concentration camps, life after the ordeal, and even his father's current mental state (until his death) is depicted in the book.

What strikes you first about Maus is the cover. You wonder, why "Maus"? You open the book and you see the significance of the word. Spiegelman uses his artistic license to depict all the humans in his story as anthropomorphs. All the Jews (such as Spiegelman) are depicted as mice (maus = mouse in German), the Germans fittingly are drawn as cats. Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs. So there is never any confusion in your head about what which citizen you are seeing. The story brilliantly moves between two time-frames, the present and the WW II time. The horrors are almost faithfully depicted. In fact, there is one panel shown where a German soldier is shown throwing a Jewish child against a wall to stop its crying, and I can't get that image out of my head. Spiegelman also shows many of the negative traits of his father, and wonders in one of the panels if he wasn't stereotyping Jews by showing his father to be a stingy opportunist. You can feel his inner conflicts as he tried to show his father's life without being demeaning.

Maus was initially published in two parts, but a combined version of the two books is available as "The Complete Maus". I liked Maus I much better than Maus II, but both are excellent. In 1992, it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize (special citation). If you read it, you'll know that it was a deserved win.

Rating for Maus I: 4.5/5

Rating for Maus II: 4/5.

Averaged to 4.25 stars.