Art Spiegelman's Maus stands "among the remarkable achievements in comics," according to Dale Luciano in Comics Journal. Maus, an epic parable of the Holocaust that substitutes mice and cats for human Jews and Nazis, marks a zenith in Spiegelman's artistic career. Prior to the Maus books, his was a name known primarily in the underground comics scene. He has been a significant presence in graphic art since his teen years, when he wrote, printed, and distributed his own comics magazine. By the end of his first year in college Spiegelman was employed by Topps Chewing Gum as a creative consultant, artist, and writer, an affiliation that wrought such pop culture artifacts as "Wacky-Packs" and "Garbage Pail Kids." In the early 1980s Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, produced the first issue of Raw, an underground comics (or as Spiegelman and Mouly refer to them, "comix") anthology...