Art Spiegelman’s 1986 graphic novel depicting Nazi persecution through cats and mice is Maus.
Maus presents Spiegelman interviewing his father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. The book moves between the father’s experiences before and during World War II and the complicated relationship between father and son in modern New York.
Spiegelman uses animal figures as a visual coding system: Jews are represented as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, and Americans as dogs. The device is intentionally artificial rather than a literal claim about identity. It emphasizes how racial categories were imposed and classified by Nazi ideology.
Maus was first serialized in the alternative comic Raw and later collected in two volumes. Its first volume, My Father Bleeds History, appeared in 1986, while the complete work was published as Maus I and Maus II. It became the first comic work to win a Pulitzer Prize, receiving a Special Award in 1992.