The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1997)

Maus as serialized in Raw, 1980 to 1991 Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly put out Raw themselves, an oversized anthology they edited and published through Mouly's own small press, and Maus ran in it as a small booklet tucked inside each issue. That do-it-yourself home gave Spiegelman years to build his account of his father's survival of the Holocaust, told with Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, before any big publisher was involved. Collected in two volumes in 1986 and 1991, it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and became the book people hand to anyone who doubts what comics can do. The Complete Maus gathers both volumes in one.