A Mouse in the Bookstore: Maus and the Publishing Industry

This paper uses a materialist framework to analyze the impact of Art Spiegelman's Maus. The emergence of Maus into the mainstream bookstore was a careful negotiation between many actors, among them the publishing industry and Spiegelman himself. Maus created a commercial market for artistic comics by adopting many of the values and commercial strategies of the mainstream literary sphere. The emergence of the graphic novel as a major form reflects these negotiations. Far from being incidental to the autonomous process of artistic creation, factors of publishing and distribution had an immense effect on the evolution of alternative comics.