Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History presents the opening chapter of a landmark Holocaust memoir told through the medium of comics. Art Spiegelman combines historical testimony with stark black-and-white illustration, using symbolic anthropomorphic imagery in which Jews are depicted as mice and Nazis as cats. The book follows Spiegelman’s conversations with his father, Vladek, recounting his life in pre-World War II Poland and the gradual descent into Nazi persecution, while also portraying the strained and complex father-son relationship that emerges as Art attempts to record and process this inherited trauma. The work blends personal memoir, historical documentation, and graphic storytelling into a narrative that reshaped the possibilities of comics as serious literature.
159 pages
1991
Pantheon Books
English
Original language: English
