I’ll admit it, I’m a snob when it comes to comic books.  Early in my reading career it became apparent that an inverse relationship existed between the number of illustrations in the book and the expected IQ of the reader.  (i.e., more pictures meant lower IQ).   As soon as I figured that out, I headed for chapter books at high speed.  Oh, I still enjoyed a great illustration once in a while but I knew better than to focus on them.  And I couldn’t grasp why so many males in my generation continued to buy, read and discuss comic books after they reached legal maturity.   It was like being trapped in a life-long, joke-less episode of “Big Bang Theory”.    People could call the publications graphic novels or comics, I didn’t care.  They were still just “funny books” for dorks.

So I didn’t see Maus coming.  Maus, if you haven’t seen it, is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman about the Holocaust.   And it’s animated, because Mr. Spiegelman is an illustrator.   And, to put the icing on the cake, Mr. Spiegelman drew the characters in his work as animals.  It sounds crazy but, believe me, it’s a work of genius.

The story works this way: the adult mouse, Art, is trying to rebuild a relationship with his father, Vladek, also a mouse.  This is not easy because Vladek is a difficult old stinker with nightmares for memories and Artie is is no poster child for mental health either. Art finally gets the old mouse to start talking about his life.  After some prodding, we hear about (and see through Art’s imagination) Vladek’s early life in Poland when he married Art’s mother and settled down in a job in manufacturing.  Then Hitler knocked at the door.

Since the Jews are mice, it only follows that the Germans are cats (not nice kitties, either – all cat lovers here, beware) because cats hunt and exterminate mice.   Art’s father, Vladek and his wife, Anja, try to avoid the Nazi juggernaut overrunning Europe but are unable to escape, are split up for a time and eventually taken to Auschwitz.   They survive, but their first born son does not.  And the story makes it clear that while the active Holocaust ended with Germany’s surrender, the damage from that experience flows on for years.  Art’s mother made it through the camps but mental illness and PTSD probably induced her suicide in 1968.  Art’s father can never transcend his terrible experiences and Art himself needs therapy to adjust to life.  Maus‘s existence is proof that art is created in spite of trauma, not because of it.  It’s also a brilliant fusion of ideas.

The animal metaphor doesn’t end with cats and mice.  The non-Jewish Poles are swine, particularly those that end up fellow prisoners but still dangerous to the captured Jews.  And the American soldiers, black and white, are the species most likely to scare cats: dogs.  But the anthropomorphized illustrations allow Art to recount  his parents’ story so the readers understand the horrors of the Holocaust without facing the terrible(forgive the pun) graphic images that remain.  It’s a brilliant way to teach children about tragic events without creating more trauma.  Come to think of it, that’s what illustrations have been doing for a very long time.  I believe I’ve been wrong about comics.

Maus won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize, the first graphic novel to attain this high honor and since then, the field has exploded.  Some great graphic novels include Barefoot Gen, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series and the brilliant Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.   But these artists, great as they are, stand on the shoulders of Art Spiegelman and his terrifying, brilliant book, Maus.  Once there was a wall between graphic novels and literature.  Spiegelman kicked the damn thing down.