SOURCE: "Boundless Schizophrenic World," in The American Book Review, Vol. 14, No. 6, February-March, 1993, pp. 6-7.

[Jones is an artist and writer. In the review below, he focuses on the graphic and visual aspects of Spiegelman's Maus, calling it "a true work of art."]

Art Spiegelman's wrenching visual narrative Maus portrays in verbatim, often tape-recorded dialogue and comics-formatted drawings Vladek Spiegelman's intricately detailed Holocaust survival story. Art Spiegelman, founder of Raw comics, where Maus was first published, relates the complex story by disguising each ethnic group as a particular animal; Jews are mice, Germans cats, and Poles pigs. The simple substitution sets up the adversarial relationships between the groups graphically in a way that only pictures can. The Germans terrorize Jews in a way that can be described only as a cat-and-mouse game. Yet the conceit never reads as a cliché. But what makes Art Spiegelman's comics rendering of his...