Art Spiegelman's Maus is an undisputed modern classic. Part history, part memoir, all comic, it recounts his father's chilling experiences during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. The Wall Street Journal called it “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust,” and The New Yorker dubbed it the “first masterpiece in comic book history.” In 1992, it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.
In MetaMaus, Spiegelman welcomes readers into his world and the thirteen years-long artistic process behind his seminal book. In extensive interviews with the author and his family—including Spiegelman's original conversation with his father, which served as the foundational narrative of Maus—MetaMaus grapples with the original work's most foundational questions: Why write about the Holocaust? Why choose comics as a medium? Why mice?
Richly interspersed with excerpts from Spiegelman's own sketchbooks, as well as drawings by Holocaust survivors and archival photographs, MetaMaus is a vivid glimpse into the creative life of an artist, the vital work of a historian, and the birth of a magnum opus.