Topline
Titles from Maus – a Pulitzer Prize-winning series about the Holocaust – made up nearly half of Amazon’s 10 best-selling comics and graphic novels Friday after one of the books was controversially banned by a Tennessee school district.
Key Facts
More than 42 years after the first graphic novel was released, a collection of the complete Maus titles is the top-selling graphic novel on Amazon, and it’s ranked 16th on the platform’s list of best-selling books from all genres.
Maus I, a Maus I and Maus II paperback box set and Maus II are also all in the top 10 of Amazon’s graphic novel best sellers.
The surge in sales followed a vote by a school board in Tennessee to ban Maus in its eighth-grade classrooms over what they claimed was the novel’s “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity” and depictions of violence and suicide, according to a statement from the district.
Maus, in which Nazis are shown as cats and Jews are drawn as mice, has been used widely in U.S. schools to educate students about the Holocaust.
The vote was held earlier this month, but news of it spread internationally this week as International Holocaust Remembrance Day was marked Thursday.
Criticism from all over the world followed, including from the national U.S. Holocaust Museum, which said in a statement it’s “more important than ever” for students to learn about the genocide.
Tangent
The banning of Maus is part of a wave of conservative actions to change school curriculums. Books dealing with gender and sexuality, social inequality and race have been banned from schools across the U.S., while a number of red states have banned critical race theory from being taught in public schools, including Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Arizona, and North Dakota. Late in his term, former President Donald Trump signed an act to promote “patriotic education” that downplayed slavery in the nation’s history.
Key Background
The Maus series is based on cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s relationship with his father, a Polish Jew who survived Nazi occupation during World War II. The first chapter of Maus was published in 1980 in comics anthology Raw, and was serialized in each following issue until 1991, when the magazine shuttered. Maus won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and remains the only graphic novel to have ever won the prestigious award.
Further Reading
Mississippi’s Black Senators Stage Walkout Over Bill Banning Critical Race Theory (Forbes)
How TikTok Helped Fuel The Best-Selling Year For Print Books (Forbes)
