MAUS by Art Spiegelman

Maus is a compelling story of the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors. it uses humor and characters with animal masks to talk about serious subjects. Art Spiegelman tells the story of his father and mother's experiences in Poland just as World War II was beginning and describes the German persecution of the Polish Jews both in the towns and cities of Poland and in the concentration camps. Its is one of the graphic novels going up against several decades of mainstream marginalization. 

As Spiegelman progressed into the drawing of Maus, he became concerned with various aesthetic aspects that were important from the point of view of the visual artist. "He was becoming increasingly concerned with deconstructing the basic narrative and visual elements of the comic strip: How does one panel on a page relate to others? How do a strip's artificial cropping and use of pictorial illusion manipulate reality?...How do words and pictures combine in the human brain." In this quest, the artist rejected photo-realism, elaborate detailing and shading, and ultimately developed a particular reduction process in which text was reduced to fit the artistic space.