I got this box set from my mother when I last visited her. I had never heard of this comic book, Maus, and was a little wary of the big swastika and mice in camp uniforms on the cover. I remember thinking that a comic book about the Holocaust just seemed wrong.

Heidi told me that these books were well known and critically acclaimed. After finishing the second volume tonight, I can see why. The books relate the author’s process of writing a comic book about his parents and World War II. The Spiegelmans were Holocaust survivors, Polish Jews who through luck, skill, and shrewdness survived. The depth of the story is incredible, conveying the difficult relationship between the author and his father, telling the father’s story during the Holocaust, and exploring the author’s own emotional struggles with writing this story, his father, his mother’s suicide, and describing the horror’s of the Holocaust itself.

I found a couple of sites that go into the scholarship that has come up around these books. One seems to be an abandoned Geocities page listing a number of papers and studies analyzing the text, along with interviews with the author. The other site is an interesting paper examining how the author and people work through personal traumas. One other site that seemed interesting was this analysis of the books for a class on illustrated books.