The class met on weekends – three hours on Saturday, three hours on Sunday – and was filled with working people: grocery store clerks, UPS delivery guys, off-duty cops, all trying to squeeze a few extra community college credits into their overstuffed lives. A giggle ran through the room when I showed the class Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the first book on our syllabus. At the time, fifteen years ago, Maus was still fairly new, and “graphic novel” wasn’t yet a term you saw on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. My students couldn’t believe they were actually going to read a comic book for an English class, much less one that told the story of the Holocaust as a kind of Tom & Jerry cartoon with the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice. - Michael Bourne’s Beyond Holokitsch: Spiegelman Goes Meta
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The class met on weekends – three hours on Saturday, three hours on Sunday – and was filled with working people: grocery store clerks, UPS delivery guys, off-duty cops, all trying to squeeze a few extra community college credits into their overstuffed lives. A giggle ran through the room when I showed the class Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the first book on our syllabus. At the time, fifteen years ago, Maus was still fairly new, and “graphic novel” wasn’t yet a term you saw on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. My students couldn’t believe they were actually going to read a comic book for an English class, much less one that told the story of the Holocaust as a kind of Tom & Jerry cartoon with the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice.

- Michael Bourne’s Beyond Holokitsch: Spiegelman Goes Meta

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