“To die, it's easy. But you have to struggle for life.”

Serialized from 1980 to 1991, Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman is a narrative memoir/biography/autobiography of Spiegelman and his parents, a Polish Jews and survivors of the Holocaust. Spiegelman tells this riveting survival story, told to him through interviews with his father, through the medium of comics. Each chapter was released in issues of Raw magazine until they were collected and published in book format, but in two volumes, in 1986 and 1991. The two volumes were subtitled My Father Bleeds History and And Here My Troubles Began. Spiegelman steeps his illustrated tale in deep symbolism, representing the Jews as mice, the Poles as pigs, and the Germans as cats.