The Comics Canon

The second volume of Art Spiegelman’s award-winning graphic memoir finds the artist grappling with the success of the first, and questioning his ability to pull off such an ambitious project.

In doing so, he adds another layer to the book’s metaphorical conceit of depicting various ethnicities as different animals, and creates a work more reflective and self-aware than its predecessor.

Meanwhile, as Spiegelman’s often contentious relationship with his father takes him from the Catskills to Florida and back to New York, Vladek’s recollections take him from the horrors of Auschwitz through the end of the war. But although he’s finally free of the concentration camp, his trials are far from over.

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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.

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