The Complete Maus Hardcover – 1 Jan. 1996

After watching Nerdwriter1's video essay of Maus I was very interested in buying the graphic novel, and honestly that video couldn't fully describe the joy I felt reading it.It's been a while since I've read Maus so bear with me while I recount what I can remember about it.Maus follows Art Spiegelman interviewing his father Vladek Spiegelman about how he survived the holocaust. The characters, including Art himself, are drawn as anthropomorphic animals in a style that's very unique. Each animal corresponds to a certain group in the graphic novel: the Jewish as mice, the Germans as cats, the Polish as pigs, and the Americans as dogs (I don't remember if other groups like the British are depicted).This stylistic choice is very important: it's reclaiming the style of propaganda that the Nazi's used to depict the Jewish (in particular how they dehumanized the Jewish by depicting them as pitch black rats. The mice in Maus are the opposite being the colour white).The story as a whole is Vladek's experience during Europe's most horrific time, his other stories like how he met Art's mother, with Art's experience and stories coming in from time to time.In fact, one part that focuses on Art's experience is one of my favourite parts of the whole comic, which is the start of the Time Flies chapter until about page 207. It's a very personal and raw look at Art's perspective on his family's life, on Maus itself a bit, the dogged interviewers and greedy licensers he had to deal with, he solace when going to his therapist, then it capped off with a lonely sigh as the tape played Vladek's last issue with his wife and then continued with the story.The whole comic is honest, real, and poignantly written, and the beautiful ink pen drawings add so much to the story. I won't bore you with a full analysis, I'll just say it's absolutely beautiful and now I want to read it all over again.(Also, it upsets me dearly that some people would ban Maus from school libraries cause it has swastikas...in a WW2 story. Yeah. Any school that has Maus on their shelves deserves my respect)

Great item. Nice quality print .Eye opening account,and thought provoking graphic novel. Recommended

I am a student of the Holocaust, having heard my dad tell of his role in liberating the camps when he was in the US army medical corps as they swept through the devastation of Germany and Poland as the Nazis were being defeated. I am also a native Tennessean, embarrassed and angered by a certain Tennessee school board for banning this hook. But had they not done that, I might never have read it! I didn’t think I would be a fan of a ‘cartoon’ book. Was I ever wrong! The tale of Nazi hatred of the Jews is exactly that told in many another history, detailing the horror and inhumanity of the outrageous purge of an entire people. My father was a photographer, too, and as a young boy in 1950s Tennessee I discovered his photo albums: the gas chambers, the ovens, the stacks of bodies, the surviving living skeletons in striped pyjamas. He sat me down and explained it in terms a young boy like me might understand. I went on to become a teacher, and was glad to lead units of study of the Holocaust to middle and high school students, and to lead visits to Auschwitz and Terezin so that we could see for ourselves what inhumanity could and did do. This prize-winning book is beautifully arranged, easy to follow, and non-putdownable. It so wonderfully portrays the lives and deaths of the unfortunate victims of Nazism. That a Tennessee school board could ban this book because of one drawing or one phrase expressing outrage at Nazi behaviour simply shows their ignorant rightwing lack of empathy. Yet, their actions have had a good result in making more people buy and read the book, people like me. Hopefully people like you. The world is not rid of racial prejudice, intolerance, religious bigotry, warfare…MAUS needs to be read as a history lesson that teaches us today that it could happen again, as it might be in Ukraine now, and in other places where intolerance and self-righteousness lead people into acts of deprivation and pain. This book is essential reading.

Astonishing book. I was utterly engrossed by the story and the representation of the nationalities . Very powerful.