Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus had a profound effect on the public perception of comics as an art form when its first volume, serializing installments that had first appeared in the alternative comics anthology Raw, appeared in 1986.
In it, Spiegelman’s conversations with his father, Vladek—background for a comic the artist wants to write—serve as an entryway into the elder Spiegelman’s harrowing, matter-of-fact account of his experiences in Poland in the 1930s and 40s, including his eventual arrival at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. In one of the book’s most disarming touches, all of its Jewish characters are portrayed as bipedal, clothes-wearing mice, while Germans are depicted as cats, and the non-Jewish people of Poland as pigs.
In this first volume, Vladek paints an increasingly grim portrait of a changing Poland and recounts the various indignities, humiliations and atrocities he and other Jews experienced during the first stages of the Holocaust.
In This Episode:
- Prisoner of the Hell Planet
- The Wild Party: The Lost Classic By Joseph Moncure
- Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio
- Our appearance on Marvel by the Month: December 1966
Join us in two weeks as our two-parter concludes with a discussion Maus: A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began.
Until then:
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