This year the school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, voted unanimously to remove cartoonist Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir Maus from the school curriculum. The book had been assigned in an eighth-grade module covering the Holocaust.
In Maus, Spiegelman retells his parents' experiences as Auschwitz survivors. Subverting the tropes of classic funny animal comics, he draws Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The book's surprising critical and commercial success was the linchpin of comics' rise to serious literary prominence in the past 35 years.
