One in a series of posts dedicated to pop-culture depictions of mice — as symbolic representations of abject other, rebellious scamp, intrepid explorer, scrappy survivor, resourceful collaborator, and habitat experimenter — from 1904–2003.

In 1972, underground cartoonist Art Spiegelman was sitting in on avant-garde moviemaker Ken Jacobs’ film class, in a session dedicated to analyzing Mickey Mouse’s debt to the racist tradition of minstrelsy.

Jacobs “was showing Mickey Mouse’s Steamboat Willie, when he’s still a Jazz Age character rather than kind of a square, and then pointed out that Mickey Mouse is just Al Jolson with funny round ears on top, that it was kind of all a form of minstrelsy,” Spiegelman would recount. “And then I thought I really had the answer to the question, which was just, ‘All right, I’ll do [a comic] about racism in America with Ku Klux cats and mice.'”

Hic incipit Spiegelman’s Maus, an early version of which first appeared that same year.

Maus, in the form that was serialized from 1980 to 1991, depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father Vladek about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodernist techniques and represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. It was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.