In the frame-tale timeline in the narrative present that begins in 1978 in New York City, Spiegelman talks with his father Vladek about his Holocaust experiences, gathering material and information for the Maus project he is preparing.

In the narrative past, Spiegelman depicts these experiences, from the years leading up to World War II to his parents' liberation from the Nazi concentration camps.

A three-page strip also called "Maus" that he made in 1972 gave Spiegelman an opportunity to interview his father about his life during World War II.

In the frame tale of the narrative present, Spiegelman interviews his father Vladek in the Rego Park neighborhood of Queens in New York City in 1978–79.

[9] Anja suffers a breakdown due to postpartum depression after giving birth to their first son Richieu,[b] and the couple go to a sanitarium in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for her to recover.

In "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", Art is traumatized by his mother's suicide three months after his release from the mental hospital, and in the end depicts himself behind bars saying, "You murdered me, Mommy, and left me here to take the rap!

As the war progresses and the German front is pushed back, the prisoners are marched from Auschwitz in occupied Poland to Gross-Rosen within the Reich and then to Dachau, where the hardships only increase and Vladek catches typhus.

[46] Spiegelman wanted to do a strip about racism, and at first considered focusing on African Americans,[48] with cats as Ku Klux Klan members chasing African-American mice.

[61] Spiegelman later came to accept the term, and with Drawn & Quarterly publisher Chris Oliveros successfully lobbied the Book Industry Study Group in the early 2000s to include "graphic novel" as a category in bookstores.

[67] In 1994 the Voyager Company released The Complete Maus on CD-ROM, a collection which contained the original comics, Vladek's taped transcripts, filmed interviews, sketches, and other background material.

It also has interviews with Spiegelman's wife and children, sketches, photographs, family trees, assorted artwork, and a DVD with video, audio, photos, and an interactive version of Maus.

In support of the African National Congress's cultural boycott in opposition to apartheid, Spiegelman refused to "compromise with fascism" by allowing publication of his work in South Africa.

[81] Another Israeli publisher put out both volumes, with a new translation by poet Yehuda Vizan that included Vladek's broken language, which Zmora Bitan had refused to do.

[86] The book portrays humans with the heads and tails of different species of animals; Jews are drawn as mice and other Germans and Poles as cats and pigs,[2] among others.

[91] This literalization of the genocidal stereotypes that drove the Nazis to their Final Solution may risk reinforcing racist labels,[92] but Spiegelman uses the idea to create anonymity for the characters.

[95] Animals signified the characters' roles in the story rather than their races—the gentile Françoise is a mouse because of her identification with her husband, who identifies with the Holocaust victims, and her conversion to Judaism.

[27][107] Spiegelman parodies the Nazis' vision of racial divisions; Vladek's racism is also put on display when he becomes upset that Françoise would pick up a black hitchhiker, a "schwartser" as he says.

The prevailing view in the English-speaking world held comics as inherently trivial,[120] thus degrading Spiegelman's subject matter, especially as he used animal heads in place of recognizably human ones.

Art's "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" is also encompassed by the frame, and stands in visual and thematic contrast with the rest of the book as the characters are in human form[52] in a surreal, German Expressionist woodcut style inspired by Lynd Ward.

[126] Throughout the book, Spiegelman incorporates and highlights banal details from his father's tales, sometimes humorous or ironic, giving a lightness and humanity to the story which "helps carry the weight of the unbearable historical realities".

[47] Among the graphic artists who influenced Maus, Spiegelman cited Frans Masereel, who had made early wordless novels in woodcuts such as Passionate Journey (1919).

[47] In 2022, the board of trustees for McMinn County Schools in east Tennessee voted unanimously to remove Maus from the curriculum over concerns including profanity, violence, and nudity.

2 ranks on Amazon at different times during the day, and also appeared as a best seller on Barnes & Noble's top 100 list and Bookshop's index of best-selling books.

[174][175] A cottage industry of academic research has built up around Maus;[176] schools have also used it as course material in a range of fields, including literature, history, dysfunctional family psychology,[2] language arts, and social studies.

[178] One of the earliest such works was Joshua Brown's 1988 "Of Mice and Memory" from the Oral History Review, which deals with the problems Spiegelman faced in presenting his father's story.

[185] Comics critic R. C. Harvey argued that Spiegelman's animal metaphor threatened "to erode [Maus's] moral underpinnings",[186] and played "directly into [the Nazis'] racist vision".

[187] Commentators such as Peter Obst and Lawrence Weschler expressed concern over the Poles' depiction as pigs,[188] which reviewer Marek Kohn saw as an ethnic slur[189] and The Norton Anthology of American Literature called "a calculated insult".

[191] In the late 1990s, an objector to Maus's depiction of Poles interrupted a presentation by Spiegelman at Montreal's McGill University with persistent abuse and was removed from the auditorium.

[193] Spiegelman depicts Europeans as different animal species based on Nazi conceptions of race, but all Americans, both black and white, as dogs—with the exception of the Jews, who remain unassimilated mice.

[194] Scholar Paul Buhle asserted: "More than a few readers have described [Maus] as the most compelling of any [Holocaust] depiction, perhaps because only the caricatured quality of comic art is equal to the seeming unreality of an experience beyond all reason".