Maus is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman (pictured in 2007), serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The book is self-referential and postmodern—most strikingly in its depiction of Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and non-Jewish Poles as pigs. The narrative consists mostly of flashbacks to the war years, framed by the interview that takes place in 1978 in the Rego Park section of New York City. Much of the story revolves around Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father, and the impact of his mother's suicide when he was 20. The book uses a minimalist drawing style with innovative page and panel layouts, pacing, and structure. Maus was serialized as an insert in Raw, an avant-garde comics and graphics magazine published by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly. It was one of the first graphic novels to receive significant academic attention in the English-speaking world, and in 1992 became the first to win a Pulitzer Prize. (Full article...)

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