The award-winning Maus tells the story of Art Spiegelman's father, a Polish Jew caught up in the Holocaust. This grim past is offset by the present-day tale of the making of the book, in which the neurotic author is shown tape-recording his even more neurotic father. In order to make such a story bearable, Spiegelman casts the characters as different animals. As one reads the two volumes of Maus, one is often startled by the realization that these things really happened, not to mice but to ordinary people.

David Lasky