29 Facts About Maus

Maus is a nonfiction book presented in the graphic novel style, written by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman.

Maus was one of the first books in graphic novel format to receive significant academic attention in the English-speaking world.

Maus spent a month in Binghamton State Mental Hospital in 1968 after a nervous breakdown.

Maus's father gave him further background information, which piqued Spiegelman's interest.

Maus got detailed information about Sosnowiec from a series of Polish pamphlets published after the war which detailed what happened to the Jews by region.

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Maus spent the rest of the 1970s building his reputation making short avant-garde comics.

Maus 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".

Maus began another series of interviews with his father in 1978, and visited Auschwitz in 1979.

Maus came to prominence when the term "graphic novel" was beginning to gain currency.

Maus was difficult for critics and reviewers to classify, and for booksellers, who needed to know on which shelves to place it.

Maus suspected the term's use was an attempt to validate the comics form, rather than to describe the content of the books.

In 2011 Pantheon Books published a companion to The Complete Maus entitled MetaMaus, with further background material, including filmed footage of Vladek.

Reception in Germany was positive—Maus was a best-seller and was taught in schools.

Maus takes a postmodern approach; Maus "feeds on itself", telling the story of how the story was made.

Maus's work is one not of memory but of postmemory—a term she coined after encountering Maus.

Maus suffers anguish over his dead brother, Richieu, who perished in the Holocaust, and whom he feels he can never live up to.

Maus uses it to befriend a Frenchman, and continues to correspond with him in English after the war.

Maus's recounting of the Holocaust, first to American soldiers, then to his son, is never in his mother tongue, and English becomes his daily language when he moves to America.

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.

Maus 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".

Maus preferred to let the reader make independent moral judgments.

Maus drew the cat-Nazis the same size as the mouse-Jews, and dropped the stereotypical villainous expressions.

Maus cited Harold Gray's comic strip Little Orphan Annie as having "influenced Maus fairly directly", and praised Gray's work for using a cartoon-based storytelling vocabulary, rather than an illustration-based one.

Hundreds of overwhelmingly positive reviews appeared, and Maus became the center of new attention focused on comics.

Maus proved difficult to classify to a genre, and has been called biography, fiction, autobiography, history, and memoir.

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Early installments of Maus that appeared in Raw inspired the young Chris Ware to "try to do comics that had a 'serious' tone to them".

Maus is cited as a primary influence on graphic novels such as Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.

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 Holocaust literature, and studies of it have made significant contributions to Holocaust studies.