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Cover of the first volume of Maus Creator Date 1991 Page count 296 pages Publisher Original publication Published in Issues Vol. 3 Date of publication 1980–1991 Maus is a by American cartoonist, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a and survivor. The work employs techniques and represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs.

Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992, it became the first graphic novel to win a (the ). In the timeline in the narrative present that begins in 1978 in New York City, Spiegelman talks with his father Vladek about his Holocaust experiences, gathering material for the Maus project he is preparing. In the narrative past, Spiegelman depicts these experiences, from the years leading up to to his parents' liberation from the. Much of the story revolves around Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father, and the absence of his mother who committed suicide when he was 20. Her grief-stricken husband destroyed her written accounts of.

The book uses a minimalist drawing style and displays innovation in its pacing, structure, and page layouts. A three-page strip also called 'Maus' that he made in 1972 gave Spiegelman an opportunity to interview his father about his life during World War II. The recorded interviews became the basis for the graphic novel, which Spiegelman began in 1978. He serialized Maus from 1980 until 1991 as an insert in, an avant-garde comics and graphics magazine published by Spiegelman and his wife, who also appears in Maus.

A collected volume of the first six chapters that appeared in 1986 brought the book mainstream attention; a second volume collected the remaining chapters in 1991. Maus was one of the first graphic novels to receive significant academic attention in the English-speaking world.

Contents. Synopsis Most of the book weaves in and out of two timelines. In the of the narrative present, Spiegelman interviews his father Vladek in the neighborhood of New York City in 1978–79. The story that Vladek tells unfolds in the narrative past, which begins in the mid-1930s and continues until the end of in 1945. In Rego Park in 1958, a young Art Spiegelman complains to his father that his friends have left him behind.

His father responds in broken English, 'Friends? Your friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week, then you could see what it is, friends!' As an adult, Art visits his father, from whom he has become estranged. Vladek has remarried to a woman called Mala since the suicide in 1968 of Art's mother Anja. Art asks Vladek to recount his Holocaust experiences.

Vladek tells of his time in the Polish city and how he came to marry into Anja's wealthy family in 1937 and move to to become a manufacturer. Vladek begs Art not to include this in the book, and Art reluctantly agrees. Anja suffers a breakdown due to after giving birth to their first son Richieu, and the couple go to a sanitarium in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for her to recover. After they return, political and tensions build until Vladek is just before the. Vladek is captured at the front and forced to work as a. After his release, he finds Germany has, and he is dropped off on the other side of the border in the. He sneaks across the border and reunites with his family.

From the original, more detailed 1972 'Maus' strip Spiegelman became a key figure in the underground comix movement of the 1970s, both as cartoonist and editor. In 1972 produced the semi-autobiographical comic book, which inspired other underground cartoonists to produce more personal and revealing work. The same year, Green asked Spiegelman to contribute a three-page strip for the first issue of Funny Aminals , which Green edited. Spiegelman wanted to do a strip about racism, and at first considered focusing on African Americans, with cats as members chasing African-American mice. Instead, he turned to the Holocaust and depicted Nazi cats persecuting Jewish mice in a strip he titled 'Maus'.

The tale was narrated to a mouse named '. After finishing the strip, Spiegelman visited his father to show him the finished work, which he had based in part on an anecdote he had heard about his father's Auschwitz experience. His father gave him further background information, which piqued Spiegelman's interest. Spiegelman recorded a series of interviews over four days with his father, which was to provide the basis of the longer Maus. Spiegelman followed up with extensive research, reading survivors' accounts and talking to friends and family who had also survived. He got detailed information about Sosnowiec from a series of Polish pamphlets published after the war which detailed what happened to the Jews by region. Spiegelman visited Auschwitz in 1979 as part of his research.

In 1973, Spiegelman produced a strip for Short Order Comix #1 about his mother's suicide called 'Prisoner on the Hell Planet'. The same year, he edited a, book of quotations, and dedicated it to his mother. He spent the rest of the 1970s building his reputation making short comics. He moved back to New York from San Francisco in 1975, which he admitted to his father only in 1977, by which time he had decided to work on a 'very long comic book'. He began another series of interviews with his father in 1978, and visited Auschwitz in 1979. He serialized the story in a comics and graphics magazine he and his wife Mouly began in 1980 called Raw. Comics medium were big business with a diversity of genres in the 1940s and 1950s, but had reached a low ebb by the late 1970s.

By the time Maus began serialization, the 'Big Two' comics publishers, and, dominated the industry with mostly titles. The movement that had flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s also seemed moribund. The public perception of comic books was as adolescent power fantasies, inherently incapable of mature artistic or literary expression. Most discussion focused on comics as a genre rather than as a medium. Maus came to prominence when the term ' was beginning to gain currency.

Popularized the term with the publication in 1978 of. The term was used partly to mask the low cultural status that comics had in the English-speaking world, and partly because the term 'comic book' was being used to refer to short-form periodicals, leaving no accepted vocabulary with which to talk about book-form comics. Publication history The first chapter of Maus appeared in December 1980 in the second issue of Raw as a small insert; a new chapter appeared in each issue until the magazine came to an end in 1991. Every chapter but the last appeared in Raw. Spiegelman struggled to find a publisher for a book edition of Maus, but after a rave review of the serial in August 1986, published the first six chapters in a volume called Maus: A Survivor's Tale and subtitled My Father Bleeds History. Spiegelman was relieved that the book's publication preceded the theatrical release of the animated film by three months, as he believed that the film, produced by 's, was inspired by Maus and wished to avoid comparisons with it. The book found a large audience, partly because of its distribution through bookstores rather than the comic shops where comic books were normally sold.

Maus was difficult for critics and reviewers to classify, and also for booksellers, who needed to know on which shelves to place it. Though Pantheon pushed for the term 'graphic novel', Spiegelman was not comfortable with this, as many book-length comics were being referred to as 'graphic novels' whether or not they had novelistic qualities. He suspected the term's use was an attempt to validate the comics form, rather than to describe the content of the books. Spiegelman later came to accept the term, and with publisher Chris Oliveros successfully lobbied the in the early 2000s to include 'graphic novel' as a category in bookstores. Pantheon collected the last five chapters in 1991 in a second volume subtitled And Here My Troubles Began. Pantheon later collected the two volumes into soft- and hardcover two-volume boxed sets and single-volume editions.

In 1994 the released The Complete Maus on, a collection which contained the original comics, Vladek's taped transcripts, filmed interviews, sketches, and other background material. The CD-ROM was based on, a -only application that has since become obsolete.

In 2011 Pantheon Books published a companion to The Complete Maus entitled, with further background material, including filmed footage of Vladek. The centerpiece of the book is a Spiegelman interview conducted by Hillary Chute.

It also has interviews with Spiegelman's wife and children, sketches, photographs, family trees, assorted artwork, and a DVD with video, audio, photos, and an interactive version of Maus. Spiegelman dedicated Maus to his brother Richieu and his first daughter. The book's is a quote from: 'The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.' International publication obtained the rights to publish the initial volume in the in 1986. In support of the 's cultural boycott in opposition to, Spiegelman refused to 'compromise with fascism' by allowing publication of his work in South Africa. (left) set up a publishing house in 2001 to put out a Polish edition of Maus in the face of protest.

By 2011, Maus had been translated into about thirty languages. Three translations were particularly important to Spiegelman: French, as his wife was French, and because of his respect for the sophisticated tradition; German, given the book's background; and. Poland was the setting for most of the book and Polish was the language of his parents and his own. The publishers of the German edition had to convince the German culture ministry of the work's serious intent to have the swastika appear on the cover, per.

Reception in Germany was positive— Maus was a best-seller and was taught in schools. The Polish translation encountered difficulties; as early as 1987, when Spiegelman planned a research visit to Poland, the Polish consulate official who approved his visa questioned him about the Poles' depiction as pigs and pointed out how serious an insult it was. Publishers and commentators refused to deal with the book for fear of protests and boycotts., a journalist for, set up his own publishing house to publish Maus in Polish in 2001. Demonstrators protested Maus 's publication and burned the book in front of Gazeta 's offices. Bikont's response was to don a pig mask and wave to the protesters from the office windows. The magazine-sized Japanese translation was the only authorized edition with larger pages. Long-standing plans for an translation have yet to come to fruition.

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A Russian law passed in December 2014 prohibiting the display of Nazi propaganda led to the removal of Maus from Russian bookstores leading up to due to the swastika appearing on the book's cover. A few panels were changed for the edition of Maus. Based on Vladek's memory, Spiegelman portrayed one of the minor characters as a member of the Nazi-installed Jewish Police. An descendant objected and threatened to sue for. Spiegelman redrew the character with a in place of his original police hat, but appended a note to the volume voicing his objection to this 'intrusion'.

This version of the first volume appeared in 1990 from the publishing house. It had an indifferent or negative reception, and the publisher did not release the second volume. Another Israeli publisher put out both volumes, with a new translation by poet that included Vladek's broken language, which Zmora Bitan had refused to do. Marilyn Reizbaum saw this as highlighting a difference between the self-image of the Israeli Jew as a fearless defender of the homeland, and that of the American Jew as a feeble victim, something that one Israeli writer disparaged as 'the diaspora sickness'.

Themes Presentation. Spiegelman's use of, similar to those shown here, conflicted with readers' expectations. Spiegelman's perceived audacity in using the Holocaust as his subject was compounded by his telling the story in comics. The prevailing view in the English-speaking world held comics as inherently trivial, thus degrading Spiegelman's subject matter, especially as he used animal heads in place of recognizably human ones. Have been a staple of comics, and while they have a traditional reputation as children's fare, the underground had long made use of them in adult stories, for example in 's, which comics critic Joseph Witek asserts shows that the genre could 'open up the way to a paradoxical narrative realism' that Maus exploited. Ostensibly about the Holocaust, the story entwines with the frame tale of Art interviewing and interacting with his father. Art's 'Prisoner on the Hell Planet' is also encompassed by the frame, and stands in visual and thematical contrast with the rest of the book as the characters are in human form in a, style inspired.

Spiegelman blurs the line between the frame and the world, such as when neurotically trying to deal with what Maus is becoming for him, he says to his wife, 'In real life you'd never have let me talk this long without interrupting.' When a prisoner whom the Nazis believe to be a Jew claims to be German, Spiegelman has difficulty deciding whether to present this character as a cat or a mouse. Throughout the book, Spiegelman incorporates and highlights banal details from his father's tales, sometimes humorous or ironic, giving a lightness and humanity to the story which 'helps carry the weight of the unbearable historical realities'. Spiegelman started taking down his interviews with Vladek on paper, but quickly switched to a tape recorder, face-to-face or over the phone. Spiegelman often condensed Vladek's words, and occasionally added to the dialogue or synthesized multiple retellings into a single portrayal. Spiegelman worried about the effect that his organizing of Vladek's story would have on its authenticity.

In the end, he eschewed a approach and settled on a linear narrative he thought would be better at 'getting things across'. He strove to present how the book was recorded and organized as an integral part of the book itself, expressing the 'sense of an interview shaped by a relationship'. Artwork The story is text-driven, with few wordless in its 1,500 black-and-white panels. The art has high contrast, with heavy black areas and thick black borders balanced against areas of white and wide white margins. There is little gray in the shading. In the narrative present, the pages are arranged in eight-panel grids; in the narrative past, Spiegelman found himself 'violating the grid constantly' with his page layouts. Spiegelman rendered the original three-page 'Maus' and 'Prisoner on the Hell Planet' in highly detailed, expressive styles.

Spiegelman planned to draw Maus in such a manner, but after initial sketches he decided to use a pared-down style, one little removed from his pencil sketches, which he found more direct and immediate. Characters are rendered in a minimalist way: animal heads with dots for eyes and slashes for eyebrows and mouths, sitting on humanoid bodies. Spiegelman wanted to get away from the rendering of the characters in the original 'Maus', in which oversized cats towered over the Jewish mice, an approach which Spiegelman says, 'tells you how to feel, tells you how to think'. He preferred to let the reader make independent moral judgments. He drew the cat-Nazis the same size as the mouse-Jews, and dropped the stereotypical villainous expressions. The contrast between the artwork in 'Prisoner on the Hell Planet' and Maus drives home the effectiveness of the simpler artwork—'Prisoner' is alienating, while Maus is more inviting, encouraging deeper contemplation and understanding. Spiegelman wanted the artwork to have a diary feel to it, and so drew the pages on with a fountain pen and typewriter.

It was reproduced at the same size it was drawn, unlike his other work, which was usually drawn larger and shrunk down, which hides defects in the art. Influences.

Wordless novels such as those by were an early influence on Spiegelman. Spiegelman has published articles promoting a greater knowledge of his medium's history. Chief among his early influences were, Will Eisner, and 's '. Though he acknowledged Eisner's early work as an influence, he denied that Eisner's first graphic novel, (1978), had any impact on Maus. He cited 's comic strip as having 'influenced Maus fairly directly', and praised Gray's work for using a cartoon-based storytelling vocabulary, rather than an illustration-based one. Justin Green's (1972) inspired Spiegelman to include autobiographical elements in his comics. Spiegelman stated, 'without Binky Brown, there would be no Maus'.

Among the graphic artists who influenced Maus, Spiegelman cited, who had made early in such as (1919). Reception and legacy Spiegelman's work as cartoonist and editor had long been known and respected in the comics community, but the media attention after the first volume's publication in 1986 was unexpected. Hundreds of overwhelmingly positive reviews appeared, and Maus became the center of new attention focused on comics. It was considered one of the 'Big Three' book-form comics from around 1986–1987, along with and, that are said to have brought the term 'graphic novel' and the idea of comics for adults into mainstream consciousness. It was credited with changing the public's perception of what comics could be at a time when, in the English-speaking world, they were considered to be for children, and strongly associated with superheroes.

Initially, critics of Maus showed a reluctance to include comics in literary discourse. The New York Times intended praise when saying of the book, 'Art Spiegelman doesn't draw comic books'. After its win, it won greater acceptance and interest among academics. The staged an exhibition on the making of Maus in 1991–92.

Spiegelman continues to attract academic attention and influence younger cartoonists. Maus proved difficult to classify to a genre, and has been called biography, fiction, autobiography, history, and memoir. Spiegelman petitioned The New York Times to move it from 'fiction' to 'non-fiction' on the newspaper's bestseller list, saying, 'I shudder to think how. Would respond to seeing a carefully researched work based closely on my father's memories of life in Hitler's Europe and in the death camps classified as fiction'. An editor responded, 'Let's go out to Spiegelman's house and if a giant mouse answers the door, we'll move it to the nonfiction side of the list!' The Times eventually acquiesced. The Pulitzer committee sidestepped the issue by giving the completed Maus a in 1992.

Maus ranked highly on comics and literature lists. Called it the fourth greatest comics work of the 20th century, and placed it first on their list of 100 Greatest Graphic Novels. Listed Maus at seventh place on their list of The New Classics: Books – The 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008, and put Maus at seventh place on their list of best non-fiction books from between 1923 and 2005, and fourth on their list of top graphic novels. Praise for the book also came from contemporaries such as and literary writers such as. Spiegelman turned down numerous offers to have Maus adapted for film or television.

Early installments of Maus that appeared in Raw inspired the young to 'try to do comics that had a 'serious' tone to them'. Maus is cited as a primary influence on graphic novels such as 's and 's. In 1999, cartoonist had an article published in criticizing Spiegelman's prominence and influence in the New York cartooning community.

Entitled 'King Maus: Art Spiegelman Rules the World of Comix With Favors and Fear', it accused the Pulitzer board of opportunism in selecting Maus, which Rall deemed unworthy. Cartoonist responded to the piece with a prank email in which Hellman posed as Rall, soliciting discussion at the email address TedRallsBalls@onelist.com. Hellman followed up by posting fake responses from New York magazine editors and art directors.

Rall launched a lawsuit seeking damages of $1.5 million for libel, breach of privacy, and causing emotional distress. To raise funds to fight the suit, in 2001 Hellman had the Legal Action Comics anthology published, which included a back cover by Spiegelman in which he depicts Rall as a urinal.

Academic work and criticism A cottage industry of academic research has built up around Maus, and schools have frequently used it as course material in a range of fields: history, dysfunctional family psychology, language arts, and social studies. The volume of academic work published on Maus far surpasses that of any other work of comics. One of the earliest such works was 's 1988 'Of Mice and Memory' from the, which deals with the problems Spiegelman faced in presenting his father's story. Marianne Hirsch wrote an influential essay on post-memory called 'Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory', later expanded into a book called Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory.

Academics far outside the field of comics such as, and took part in the discourse. Few approached Maus who were familiar with comics, largely because of the lack of an academic comics tradition— Maus tended to be approached as Holocaust history or from a film or literary perspective. In 2003, Deborah Geis edited a collection of essays on Maus called Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's 'Survivor's Tale' of the Holocaust. Maus is considered an important work of, and studies of it have made significant contributions to., p. 98;, p. 154. ^, pp. 100–101., p. 250;, p. 123., p. 100;, p. 38., p. 34;, p. 211., p. 85;, p. 172., p. 250;, p. 123;, p. 29. ^, pp. 291, 293., pp. 291, 294., pp. 76–77;, p. 27;, p. 180., p. 122;, p. 36., pp. 22–24., p. 221;, p. 1.;, p. 3;, pp. 68–84., p. 171;, p. 118., p. 118;, p. 172., p. 55;, p. 156., p. 94;, p. 26;, p. 169.

^;, pp. 122–125., pp. 122–124.;, pp. 152–153., p. 135–136., p. 250;, pp. 112–114., pp. 221–223., p. 210;, p. 140., p. 25;, p. 53;, p. 55., p. 17;, p. 231., pp. 167–168., pp. 166–167. ^, pp. 207–208., pp. 25–26., p. 172;, p. 246;, p. 262;, p. 1;, p. 7., pp. 94–95., p. 223;, p. 406., p. 118;, p. 25., pp. 39–40;, p. 219. For 'biography', see For 'fiction', see; For 'autobiography', see For 'history', see;; For 'memoir', see;.;, p. 405., pp. 139–140;, p. 221., p. 55;, pp. 32–33., p. 56;, p. 32., pp. 142, 160., pp. 32–33;.

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's Maus is the most unlikely of creations: a comic book about the Holocaust. Yet when the first volume of Maus was published in 1987, it met with enormous critical and commercial success, and to this day it is widely considered to be among the best and most powerful of a long list of Holocaust-inspired works. When the second volume was published in 1991, the completed work was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for Letters, an almost unprecedented honor for a medium usually reserved for super heroes and the Sunday comics (though to be fair, the creators of Doonesbury and Bloom County, popular Sunday comics, have also won Pulitzers for their work).

In Maus, the different races and nationalities within the story are portrayed as different kinds of animals. Jews, for example, are portrayed as mice, while the Germans are depicted as cats. A precursor to Maus was first published in an underground comic magazine called Funny Animals in 1972. The piece was only three pages long, but many of the same elements were there, including the focus on his father, and the decision to portray Jews as mice. The artwork was, however, more overtly comical and cartoonish.

Spiegelman continued to work on his creation, and in 1980, when he co-founded the underground comic magazine Raw, he began publishing Maus as a serial graphic novel, which appeared in six installments between 1981 and 1986. These installments were colleted and published as Maus I: My Father Bleeds History in 1987. The publication of Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began, followed a similar route, appearing as a serial in Raw before being published in full in 1992. Maus consists of two primary narratives of equal importance.

The first major narrative is directed by Art's father, Vladek Spiegelman, who offers the story of his experiences in the Holocaust, as told to his son through a series of interviews. This narrative begins in pre-war Poland and tracks his life over a period of approximately ten years, from his marriage to his wife, Anja, in 1937, through his experiences in Auschwitz, and to his eventual immigration to Sweden after the war. The second major narrative focuses on Art's complex and conflicted relationship with his father between 1978 and 1982, while he interviews the old man about his Holocaust experiences. In addition to these primary narratives, there are also two 'minor' narratives that appear only briefly within the story. The first of these is a short comic that originally published in 1972, which details the story of Art's mother's suicide in 1968. The comic is eventually discovered by Vladek and reprinted in full in the middle of the first volume of Maus. The second minor narrative occurs at the beginning of the second chapter of Maus II and takes place in 1987, shortly after the publication of Maus I.

It is a deeply personal and self-reflective narrative revealing the conflicting emotions of the author with regards to his father and the publication of Maus. Though Maus is a comic book, its impact and complexity are far greater than most works of this medium. The story explores the nature of guilt, and the narrative serves as a meditation on the effects of a major historical event - in this case the traumatic events of the Holocaust - on the lives of people who were born after it ended. With its complex themes and structure and unconventional medium of a graphic novel, Maus almost defies description.

Equal parts fiction, biography, autobiography, and history, it is in many ways a book that rises above genre to become something completely unique, and it is an amazing and lasting story that is destined to become a classic. How To Cite in MLA Format Murphy, Jack. Berkow, Jordan ed. 'MAUS Study Guide'.

GradeSaver, 28 January 2007 Web.