“The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but not human” – Adolf Hitler

If you thought comic books were for adolescents only and that serious people read prose which no pictures can seep into, try Maus. You are about to change your mind.

Art Spiegelman’s (the author’s) parents were polish jews; both have survived concentration camps and came to live in the US. It is through Art’s long conversations with his dad that we learn their story.

What a character he is! Brave, resourceful, smart, crafty on the border of cunning. There are plenty of endearing linguistic quirks, but what made me laugh and shake my head in admiring disbelief were his penny-saving tricks: such as returning uneaten products to a supermarket for cash, or (my personal favourite) keeping fire burning on a stove all day to save a match. You can’t help but adore him, as if he were the member of your own family.

The light-hearted tone does not take anything away from the tragedy of the story. The story of loss, of betrayal, of price paid for survival, of the disastrous failure of humanity in the 20th century. The ingenious concept Art employed was to illustrate races using animals, following the common racist misconceptions: mice for jews, cats for germans (since they chase mice), pigs for poles, frogs for french. Atrocious, especially when illustrated, this is precisely how those in power saw things to be. This simplifies the exhaustive and underlines the important:  through categorising by racial groups, people stopped being humane.

A comic book about the Holocaust, MAUS is both strange and brilliant, first graphic to get a Pulitzer. I hope not the last. More historical and political issues deserve to be portrayed in the genre that speaks so easily to many. Maybe, to gain fresh perspectives, we should get outside of the box of what we are used to, and inside the frames of comic strips.