SOURCE: Witek, Joseph. “History and Talking Animals: Art Spiegelman's Maus.” In Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar, pp. 96-120. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.

In the following essay, Witek presents a detailed analysis of Art Spiegelman's Maus, describing it as a significant work of art and literature that powerfully illustrates the impact of sequential art.

The clearest sign that something unusual was afoot in the 1980s in the sequential art medium came in 1987, when the National Book Critics Circle nominated a comic book by Art Spiegelman for its annual award in biography.¹ Comic-book readers had long known of the work of Spiegelman, first as an artist, writer, and editor in the underground comix, and later as the coeditor of the avant-garde comics and graphics anthology Raw. But few people were prepared for the public acclaim for Spiegelman or...