SOURCE: "Comics and Catastrophe," in The New Republic, Vol. 196, No. 3779, June 22, 1987, pp. 29-34.

In the following essay, Gopnik examines Art Spiegelman's Maus, a comic book about the Holocaust, in the historical context of traditional cartoon imagery and caricature.

If you ask educated people to tell you everything they know about the history and psychology of cartooning, they will probably offer something like this: cartoons (taking caricature, political cartooning, and comic strips all together as a single form) are a relic of the infancy of art, one of the earliest forms of visual communication (and therefore, by implication, especially well suited to children); they are naturally funny and popular; and their gift is above all for the diminutive.

But these beliefs about cartooning are not merely incomplete; they are in almost every respect the direct reverse of the truth. Cartoons are not a primordial form. They are the relatively...