One of my all time favorite comics is Maus(my review). Art Spiegelman recreated his father’s life in simple pictures and evocative words. The book was about the Holocaust, but, in reality, it was about so much more. So, it was with great trepidation that I approached Metamaus. Years before, Spiegelman had given access to all his notes and material he used to create Maus to Hillary Chute. That is really the beginning of Metamaus. But what is Metamaus?

The book comes with a DVD that is simply amazing (and I’ll get to that in a bit), but the majority of the book is simply Chute asking Spiegelman questions for over 200 pages. Followed by a family tree and transcripts of Vladek.. Every question you could imagine wanting to ask about Maus. From how did it begin, to “Why Mice?” to the reactions of everyone afterwards to how he handled the sudden fame. There are a lot of things that I didn’t know about. For instance, the book was released in two volumes due to An American Tail. The whole project started in Funny Animals #1 because Spiegelman (wanting to do something about black/white race relations) realized that he couldn’t keep up with Robert Crumb on race, so he decided to use his families history instead. There was a lot of thought that went into deciding the animal type for each nationality (some of which is discussed in the original book) and the decision to show Poles as pigs caused all sorts of issues for publishing Maus in Poland. And their were issues publishing the book in Israel (where you would think it would be a huge seller) because the original publishers didn’t like the broken Hebrew of Vladek. And of course the wonderful exchange with a reporter in Germany.

Reporter: Don’t you think that a comic book about Auschwitz is in bad taste?
Spiegelman: No, I though Auschwitz was in bad taste.

 Then we get to the DVD. There are two sections to the DVD. The second is the transcripts (and audio) of Vladek and a whole bunch of Maus research and related materials. It’s the type of thing that can keep a fan busy for months. But the real jewel of the DVD is Maus. The DVD has the complete book and on several pages, there are audio clips from Spiegelman talking about why something was done the way it was or audio clips of Vladek that relate to the page. And there is also some early drafts of some of the pages. This is an amazing resource for someone who loves Maus. I regret that I had reservation about the book and didn’t grab it when it came out. If you are a fan, then you owe it to yourself to get Metamaus. Highly recommended.