"I needed to do something to find my way back," he says, "because I was getting very confused." The way back was a kind of meta-comic in which Art, a human cartoonist wearing a mouse mask, struggles to finish his book about mouse cartoonist Artie and his mouse father. Spiegelman decided to include this sequence in "Maus II." That introduced a new concern: the moral dilemma of creating art about the Holocaust.
"To create anything of the Holocaust that offers pleasure on any level is a diminishment of the suffering that allowed the art-making," he says. "The short form of this is a drawing table on top of a pile of bodies"--an unnerving image from "Maus II."
