Trivia / Maus

• Follow the Leader: Maus led to several more graphic novels serving as gritty memoirs, notably Persepolis and Fun Home.
• He Also Did: Art Spiegelman is also the creator of Garbage Pail Kids. It sounds unbelievable, but it's true.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Spiegelman never expected that this book would be so popular — he wrote it for his family, not for the world. In his second volume, he revealed this caused him some emotional distress.
• No Adaptations Allowed: Art Spiegelman has turned down all offers to adapt the graphic novel into a film, viewing it as commercialization of a very personal story he never expected would explode into such popularity. According to him, his wife even joked that his greatest accomplishment has been not adapting it.
• No Export for You: During its initial publication Spiegelman refused to allow publication of Maus in South Africa in protest of Apartheid. More recently a potential Arabic translation is stuck in Development Hell.
• Streisand Effect: As a result of the controversy surrounding the comic's ban by the local School Board of McMinn County, Tennessee in January 2022, interest in the book exploded and it became a Best Seller in Fiction Satire on Amazon.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Tragically In-Universe as there's an arc in Volume I of Art trying to procure his mother's diaries from his father only to find Vladek destroyed them. Just imagine how Maus would have been with Anja's diaries.
  • In addition, Art asks his father about the letters of his French friend (a frog) from the camps when they corresponded after the war. Vladek regretfully says he destroyed those too.
  • Art mentioned he turned down offers to have the comic turned into an animated movie — it's even alluded to in the second volume. According to Art, the reason why he's turned down all these offers is because he feels that it would be too difficult to make a film adaptation without commercializing and trivializing the Holocaust.
  • The comic was originally going to be one volume, but Spiegelman wanted to get it out ahead of the release of An American Tail, a movie also featuring Jewish mice, as he feared that a project with Steven Spielberg's name attached to it would likely vastly overshadow his comic. Spiegelman would publicly accuse the directors Spielberg and Don Bluth of plagiarism, though beyond using cats and mice as a metaphor for antisemitism, the stories share little in common.
  • Early drafts of the story played up the animal metaphor more heavily, with the Jews being referred to as mice, the Nazis as Der Katzen, and Auschwitz as Mauschwitz. More Animal Stereotypes were featured as well, such as the Vladek stand-in being made to work in a kitty litter factory. By Art Spiegelman's own admission, this was because he initially merely intended to use his father's experiences during the Holocaust to draw parallels to contemporary interclass conflicts before shifting his focus toward documenting them more accurately and thoroughly as he pursued the concept further. In the final story, the animal metaphor is almost exclusively a visual one — every character that is meant to be human is referred to as a human and their nationalities are overtly referenced.
  • Similar to the above, the meta aspect of the narrative was not initially present at all, with the father and son not being explicitly identified as the author and his father. Art Spiegelman decided to include the framing device of himself interviewing his father in the comic as a way of emphasizing that his depiction of the Holocaust was an interpretation of an individual's memories of the event rather than the objective reality.
  • The cats were at one point intended to be much larger than the mice, as they are in reality, but were later made to be the same approximate size so as not to suggest that the Nazis possessed any inherent superiority over the Jews.
  • There were initially no other animals present in the story besides mice and cats. Spiegelman eventually decided to represent the Poles as pigs — early drafts had them depicted as cats like the Germans — when it became apparent that their presence as a third party was too prevalent to ignore. Their being pigs was intended to emphasize their neutrality: unrelated to the Animal Jingoism of the cat-mouse chain and with a history of being depicted as both friendly and sinister in fiction.
  • Art Spiegelman considered replacing the rats his parents encountered while hiding in a cellar with a different verminous animal such as cockroaches to avoid the Furry Confusion that including them would lead to. Eventually, he realized this confusion would be to his benefit due to it reinforcing the mouse-faced characters as humans and instead chose to draw the scariest, most realistic-looking rats he could to make them contrast the simplistic and cartoonish mouse faces of the Jews.

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