Maus II

First lines

Summer vacation. Francoise and I were staying with friends in Vermont...

About this book

"Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Mausintroduced readers to Vladek Spieglman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive. This second volume, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, moves us from the barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskills. Genuinely tragic and comic by turns, it attains a complexity of theme and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. Mausties together two powerful stories: Vladek's harrowing take of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of family life in the death camps, and the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. At every level this is the ultimate survivor's tale-and that too of the children who somehow survive even the survivors." --Front flap

Themes & subjects

About the author

Art Spiegelman

15 Feb 1948

Art Spiegelman (born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman on February 15, 1948) is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel *Maus*. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines *Arcade* and *Raw* has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for *The New Yorker*. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman. **Source**: [Art Spiegelman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Spiegelman) on Wikipedia