Maus

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses the Holocaust, antisemitism, and antisemitic violence.

Born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1948, Art Spiegelman emigrated with his parents to New York City as a child. After dropping out of college and enduring the nervous breakdown mentioned in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” Spiegelman became an underground comics writer and an illustrator for the Topps Company, where he created the Garbage Pail Kids line of gross-out trading cards. He later married Françoise Mouly, and together they published the comics anthology RAW, which hosted the original run of Maus. Spiegelman also contributed to the New Yorker, which eventually employed Mouly as an art editor, until shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In response, Spiegelman published In the Shadows of No Towers, which detailed his firsthand account of the incident along with his unease at both the antisemitic terrorists responsible and the jingoistic American response to the attacks. For Maus’s 25th anniversary, Spiegelman published a companion book, MetaMAUS, with transcripts and interviews (Cooke, Rachel. “Art Spiegelman: ‘Auschwitz Became for Us a Safe Place.’” The Guardian, 22 Oct. 2011).

In Maus, Art plays the role of an interviewer who records Vladek’s story.