MAUS, a Holocaust survivor story, written and illustrated by Art Spiegelman, explores many intriguing and engaging features of the comic book genre to express the themes of racism, survival and the ties between the past and the present. MAUS is a graphic novel, illustrated and written around the story of a Jewish Holocaust survivor called Vladek, whose experience followed many of the perils and devastation of the time. Art Spiegelman, the son of Vladek, uses Vladek’s story to portray the themes of
a genocide in which approximately six million Jews were killed by Hitler’s Nazi regime and its collaborators. Graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, the son of Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors, uses his father’s stories of the Jewish genocide to create Maus, a first hand account of the Holocaust told through casual interviews with his father. Art Spiegelman incorporates information most authors would exclude from their work in order to give a raw representation of all the parts of his father’s story.