Everyone talks about the mice. It's really about a son who can't stand his father, taping him anyway, in the same room.

The mice are the least interesting thing about it and they are all anybody ever mentions. Yes: Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, and yes it's a device that gets more uncomfortable the longer you sit with it, which Spiegelman knows and pokes at repeatedly rather than defending.

What it's actually about is a man in his thirties in New York with a tape recorder, trying to get a story out of his father, who is difficult, tight with money, racist in a way his son cannot excuse, and who keeps derailing the interview to complain about his second wife or to make Art take the pills out of the bathroom cabinet. The Holocaust narrative sits inside a frame about the making of the Holocaust narrative, and the frame is where the pain is. Vladek survives Auschwitz and remains an infuriating man to be in a room with. Does the book resolve those two facts for you? It does not, and it would be a lesser book if it tried.

The section people miss is the strip pasted into the middle. Prisoner on the Hell Planet, drawn years earlier in a completely different style, about his mother's suicide — expressionist, black, close to hysterical, nothing like the clean line of everything around it. It sits in there like a stone in a loaf of bread. He drops it in without warning and then carries on. That's the most formally daring thing in the whole book and nobody discusses it, because everyone is still on the mice.

And the diaries. Anja kept notebooks all the way through it, and Vladek burned them after her death because he could not stand to look at them, and when Art finds this out he calls his father a murderer, on the page, in a panel, and then the chapter just ends.

The second volume is better than the first and less loved. Its opening, with him at the drawing board on a heap of bodies while agents ring about film rights and his father's story is still unfinished, is a man writing about the obscenity of his own success while the success is happening to him.

Publishing footnote, because I can't help myself. It got a special Pulitzer because nobody could work out which category to file it under, which tells you exactly how the industry regarded comics at the time. And when a Tennessee school board pulled it in 2022 over eight swear words and a small drawing of a naked mouse, it shot back up the charts and a lot of people bought a copy in order to make a point. I'd rather they read it. The nudity objection is especially stupid given the character is a mouse in a bath!

Nine. Read both volumes together. If you've only ever done volume one, you've read the setup.