Art Spiegelman, With a Human Face for a Change

For my birthday (Thanksgiving in 2004), one of my presents was part II of the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman. A graphic novel is a longer comic book published in hardcover or paperback rather than magazine format, for those unfamiliar with the term.
For those who aren't familiar with it, Maus is two stories: first, the story of his father, Vladek Spiegelman, and how he survived the Holocaust (Art himself was born after, in 1948). Second, it is the story of his relationship to his father as he interviews him about his experiences for this book.
The gimmick, or conceit, or what-have-you of Maus is that the character's nationalities are portrayed through replacing their heads with those of animals. Jews are mice (hence the title), Germans cats, Americans dogs, Polish pigs, French frogs, British fish, Norwegians (or is it Swedes?) as elk, and a few other animals representing nationalities that are not made explicit. When people tried to pretend to be another nationality (Polish Jews pretending to be Polish Gentiles in order to escape capture, for example) they were portrayed as wearing masks with the desired animal's face.
It should be noted that except insofar as it relates to nationality, race wasn't included in the metaphor; an African-American in one scene is simply portrayed as a black dog.
In any case, for those of you who wish to see what Art Spiegelman actually looks like without the mouse-mask, scroll to the bottom of this page. For some reason, he seems a little underwhelming; I always imagined him a more gaunt and with a moustache (probably from his portrayal of himself in his four-page comic "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," which dealt with his mother's suicide, and which appears in Maus I - of course, that portrayal was of him when he was twenty, so it is not surprising that it looks nothing like him now he's in his mid-fifties).
I think in some ways that Maus has been the moat moving portrayal of the Holocaust I have seen. Perhaps this is because the book utterly lacks a political agenda. Spiegelman wishes to show us what happened, not to use it to impose his ideas of how society should operate; infact, he specifically denies wanting to send a message in a little insert in the second book.
It also contains (although this may sound sappy) a moving affirmation of the human spirit, and triumph over adversity, etc. The will to survive of Vladek and his wife Anja during the Holocaust and their perseverance and final victory as they survive past the German defeat and find each other again is overwhelming. That there are people who could go through what they did and actually eke out an existence is simply amazing.

I think I'll close with a quote from Vladek (as best as I can recollect it) from the start of book I, when a young Art cries because his friends roller-skated away without him:
"Friends? You friends? Lock them in a room with no food for ten days, and then you'll see what it is, friends."