TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: When did you first become aware that your parents were survivors? You have to do a lot more work to decode a comic strip than you do in understanding a film or even reading a book. And on the other hand, they're a very, very abstract medium. Like, just too - it's an oxymoron somewhere in there, and people just don't want to hear any more after that.īut it seems to me that comics are, on the one hand, a very direct medium. Here's Art Spiegelman talking to Terry Gross.ĪRT SPIEGELMAN: People are usually very upset when they first hear that I've done a comic strip about the Holocaust. The book has moving flashback sequences as his father describes passing as a Gentile, hiding out in bunkers, and facing death in a concentration camp. He has a difficult relationship with his father, and he hopes these conversations will bring them closer. He coaxes his father to remember the war years and let him record his stories on tape.

It shows Spiegelman in his father's house in Queens, N.Y. The comic is like a documentary about the making of the book. The book tells the story of how his Jewish parents survived the Holocaust in Poland. He said he found the mouse metaphor appropriate to Hitler's rhetoric of extermination and his references to Jews as vermin. In 'Maus,' Spiegelman draws the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats.

We thought we'd listen back to Terry's 1987 interview with Spiegelman in which he talks about drawing and writing that book. Last month, a Tennessee school district banned the book 'Maus,' the 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman.

Maus by Art Spiegelman