Art Spiegelman's, The Complete Maus

Art Spiegelman's (1997) two volume graphic novel The Complete Maus (A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History and Here My Troubles Began) is an informative account of his father's interment in the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust of WWII. Using images of mice as Jews and cats as Nazis, the comic-strip styled works tell the story of Spiegelman's father, from its beginning before being deported by the Nazis to its end that depicts his father's struggles to live beyond the horrors of the concentration camps. As Campbell (2004) maintains, "Graphic novels use images and words to tell a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. It is different from a commix book in that the story ends" (18).

Maus' two-volume story of his father's survival of the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps uses cartoon-like animal characters to tell of the death camps and his struggles to survive. As Fazioli (2003) suggests, these books "use the seemingly innocent art form of the comic strip to underscore the horror and depravity of the Jewish Holocaust as well as examine Spiegelman's tenuous relationship with his father" (84). Similar to African American experiences of surviving slavery and the oppression of racism, Spiegelman's books show that Jews, like African Americans, were often as opportunistic as Nazis in perpetuating the horrors of the Holocaust.

Those who lived through the Holocaust and those who lived through slavery en

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