Art Spiegelman's MAUS is a piece of literature that is unusual to most readers. Spiegelman is a comic book artist by trade. In the early 1970's he began working with his father to create what would eventually become the two volumes of MAUS as they are today. This process included among other things years of research, over 75 hours of taped interviews with his father, and a trip to Poland.

The book, however, is not simply a trascription of the interviews with Vladek, Art's father. It is also a personal testimony of the relationship that Art shared, or didn't share, with his father, his wife and his step-mother. It tells the story of his mother who committed suicide in 1968. The book documents Vladek's story as he tells it, Art's reaction to the story, Art's desire to hear more and the effect that writing this book has on its author. It is as much a personal account of the events of 1973-1991 as it is an account of the events 1935-1945. The following excerpt from page 136 of Volume II, the last page of the book, shows the way in which the real time of the interview is brought in to the story which Vladek tells about the events of 1939.

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This connection between real time and the past is made throughout the book, allowing the reader to have some experience of the interview. Art encourages his father to keep his stories in as close to chronological order as possible. Memories are not chronological, so Spiegelman's portrayal of Vladek's desire to digress in his storytelling is important to the context of the book.

MAUS is designed in such a way that a reader gets the sense that he is reading the book; that there is room for individual interpretation, which is something not often found in comic books. By allowing for interpretation by the reader, leaving many questions unanswered, Spiegelman is able to give his audience a literary work that pushes the envelope of subject-meduim compatibility. When asked by a German reporter whether he believed it was in good taste to make a comic out of such a serious historical event, Spiegelman replied that the event itself was in bad taste. By making this statement, Spiegelman was trying to impress on the reporter that any means for discussing such an horrific event should be acceptable.

The book began with the idea for the metaphor on which it is based. Spiegelman wanted to work with anthropomorphism in a comic book, and decided to use cats and mice as the center of this particular comic. Upon working with the idea, Spiegelman came to the decision that the animals he had chosen would work well to tell his father's experience in period just before and during the holocaust.

The characters in the book are human forms with animal faces. Spiegelman does not want them to be seen as animals. They are people with masks that allow them to be identified immediately. Often, Spiegelman uses the idea of masks throughout the book, placing himself in a mouse mask as he is shown working on the book, showing characters in the 1930's and 40's in disguises wearing the masks of Christian Poles and German Nazis.