Reception and Reviews

Spiegelman has described Maus as "being kind of a crossover hit". The initial work being rejected by many before production, Spiegelman did not expect much of an impact outside of comic fans who would dig deeper. The reality, though, is that Maus became a historical turnover and the story of the Holocaust has been further expanded through the power of Maus. It has recieved several awards including the Angoulême International Comics Festival Awards, the Urhunden Prize, the Harvey Award, the Book Prize for Fiction from the Los Angeles Times, and the Pulitzer Prize. The emotional and reactive responses it has recieved has both been negative and positive, however. Its popularity equaled to the division in reactions due to its senitive themes and its methods of storytelling.

Criticism
Maus represents Holocaust victims as mice and the Nazis as cats. Because of its rather naive simplification in the victims, many Holocaust victims took offense in their sufferings being retold as a cartoon used as an entertainment and turning them into helpless preys. Art Spiegelman was inforcing that the Holocaust victims were like animals and dehumanizing them as well as stereotyping them. Maus has indeed helped reach the memories and stories of the victims to a wide audience, but at the same time it has brought the seriousness of comics and helped people take it with more weight than lightheartedly seen before. A contrioversy that enforces this is the fact that Maus has faced censory issues before the German covernment which had laws banning Swastika appearances on books that are more light hearted and Spiegelman ' publicist worked hard in proving to the mass that Maus had the intention of telling a serious story of his experiences and its purposes were more educational than entertainment. Maus has also been banned from bookstores in Russia due to its new law of banning Nazi propaganda and Maus ' ability of doing so even without intention.