A review by brennanaphone
The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman

5.0

Clear-eyed, brutal, loving, and couragously helpless. There is no message to this book; it is instead quite simply a survivor's story in his own words.

I have huge admiration for Spiegelman for how he structured the story around his father's tale. The use of different animals for ethnicities; the way he weaves in his own tense and frustrated relationships to his parents; and the way he refuses to moralize, sentimentalize, or shape the events of the Holocaust to fit a convenient narrative--all of it works to show you the bleakness of the war and how far-reaching its ripples are.

I'm not surprised this won the Pulitzer Prize, and I can definitely see its influence on other graphic memoirs, most notably Persepolis.