Hillary L. Chute suggested in her book, Disaster Drawn (2016) that the absence of colour in Rosenthal's work may have been due to the availability of materials at the time.

The collection, entitled Mickey à Gurs: Les Carnets de dessin de Horst Rosenthal (Mickey in Gurs: The comic books of Horst Rosenthal), was compiled and edited by Belgian political scientist and historian Joël Kotek [fr], and French journalist and curator Didier Pasamonik [fr].

[2][3] Glyn Morgan described Mickey au Camp de Gurs as a blend of Walt Disney and Hergé that deploys "critique and darkly-comic parody".

[2] Morgan said Mickey Mouse is both an American outsider and a Jewish inmate, making him a "metatextual being" able to transcend the reality of the situation and give Rosenthal an otherwise unobtainable point of view.

[4] Pnina Rosenberg wrote that the cover of Rosenthal's comic showing a smiling Mickey Mouse in a concentration camp creates an incongruity that grows as the story progresses.

[11] The dissonance culminates when Mickey decides to escape his "absurd, Kafkaesque" predicament, and erases himself to flee to the land of "liberty, equality and fraternity",[12] but he makes it clear it is America he is going to, not France, which has abandoned its national motto, liberté, égalité, fraternité, turned its back on human rights and become anti-semitic.

[14] Rosenberg said Rosenthal uses Disney's mouse to convey the "surrealistic situation" the camp's inmates found themselves in, and "sharply criticizes" the French government for forsaking them.

Chute called Mickey in Gurs "a haunting precursor to Maus",[8] and stated that both works were instrumental in shaping the development of contemporary comics.

[20] Stephen Feinstein wrote that Rosenthal's statement "Published without Walt Disney's Permission" on the front cover of Mickey au Camp de Gurs illustrated the author's concern about infringing copyright.

[22] Knudde noted that the comic's optimistic ending suggested that Rosenthal believed that he too would be set free, and was oblivious of what the Nazis had planned for him and the other detainees.