Welcome to the third weekend of January 2026! We are again delighted to welcome one of Leilya Pitra's teacher candidates, Collin McClure, from Southeastern Louisiana University as our Weekend Picks contributor this week. Collin has chosen a classic, Maus, for his YA Weekend Pick.
 Collin McClure | First, a word about our contributor: meet Collin McClure. Collin is a senior English education major at Southeastern Louisiana University and will be graduating with his BA in May, 2026. He lives outside of Baton Rouge with his wife. Collin appreciates learning and thinking about religion, morality, and archetypes in literature. He enjoys reading a good short story or writing while sitting under the shade of a tree. Our many thanks to professor Leilya Pitra and her Southeastern Louisiana University students for their thoughtful recommendations this month! |
Maus by Art Spiegelman
I was outside and reading Art Spiegelman’s renowned 1986 graphic novel Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale, My Father Bleeds History when my grandfather walked past me. Seeing what I was reading, he said, “When I was in college in the sixties, it would have amazed me to be assigned comics as coursework.” Indeed, it would have been amazing for such a genre to be assigned in the literature classroom in his day, but academic legitimacy is exactly what Maus helped establish for comics and for the graphic novel. This first volume of Spiegelman’s two-volume work centers on the experiences of the author’s father surviving the chief horror of the Second World War, namely, the Holocaust. Told from Spiegelman’s perspective starting in 1978, the author interviews his father, Vladek Spiegelman, to tell his story in a comic, but must unwillingly listen to his father’s present-day troubles of his life in Queens, New York. Their strained relationship and Vladek’s declining health lead to many breaks in the Holocaust narrative, which stretches from pre-war tremors to mid-1944, still a year before the fall of Nazi Germany. The novel sees Vladek evade capture by the Nazis around western Poland, yet the central conflict of the work is the strained relationship between he and his son since the suicide of Spiegelman’s mother.
 | Maus is heavy. This is partially due to the subject, but the 1978 timeline of grief, strife, and illness add to the realistic yet absurd take on life as a Jewish person. Spiegelman’s choice to portray the different ethnic populations in Europe as different animals places a veil between the reader and the real history being recounted. Depicting Germans as cats and Jews as mice, Spiegelman complicates the narrative by ironically embracing the racist beliefs behind the hatred that fueled the Holocaust. This decision underscores the secondary message that Jewish people have not entirely recovered from this great horror. Additionally, the plot’s occasional anachronisms add an additional layer of reality to the narrative as the reader experiences the thoughts and narrative choices of Vladek as he recounts the events to his son. The narrative is framed only in Spiegelman’s contemporary perspective while interviewing and interacting with his father, which places Maus awkwardly between an autobiography of Spiegelman and a biography of his father. |
Further, volume one ends without a specific resolution to his and Vladek’s relationship, searing the reader’s hope of a happy ending in either 1944 or ‘78. I found Spiegelman’s attempt at an objective portrayal of his father to be quite noteworthy.
| Readers may be surprised to find that Vladek is cast not as a traditional hero, but as a rather unlikeable, greedy man who fails to connect emotionally with those around him. While Spiegelman’s refusal to omit these sections testifies to the objective nature with which he wanted to interview his father. Vladek’s portrayal teeters on subjectivity in the sense that Spiegelman is honest in his disdain for his father due to grief over his mother’s suicide. Again, this conflict causes Maus to exist somewhere in between biography and memoir. Maus brings a level of emotional depth that is all but absent in many history textbooks, and those who found themselves trudging through classes on the Holocaust can find a renewed interest in Vladek’s personal experience. Many may even find Spiegelman’s use of anthropomorphic animals to explore racial and ethnic identity familiar, as later graphic novels such as Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese perhaps took some inspiration from the absurd cat and mouse metaphor. |  Art Spiegelman |
Spiegelman’s Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale, My Father Bleeds History helped bring validity to comics within academia. Though knowledgeable on the subject prior to reading, I gained much understanding of the experience of life after the Holocaust through the real, rugged picture of Spiegelman’s relationship with his father. I thoroughly recommend this graphic novel to those who like or even dislike graphic novels, as its quality comes not only from the text and images but from each reader’s interaction with the work’s difficult themes.
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