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Black & white cartoon from Maus II

Graphic Novels

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale

Art Spiegelman

1991


When Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for Maus, the ability of the graphic novel to express powerful themes was confirmed.

The narrative within Maus: A Survivor's Tale & Here My Troubles Began is multi-layered. It recounts the traumatic experience of the Holocaust by Spiegelman’s father alongside the desire of a second-generation Holocaust survivor, his son, who was born in 1948, to come to terms with these events and to relate to his father.

Spiegelman uses the comic strip form to ‘speak the unspeakable’, depicting the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice.

Parts of Maus were first published in Raw, a New York magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics which Spiegelman co-founded and was later taken up by Pantheon Books.

Images © 1991 by Art Spiegelman, reproduced by permission of The Wylie Agency.