While reading Maus, I felt as if I was experiencing a wholly new literary genre-- when I started, I wasn't quite sure what to expect, and the ending left me reeling. A work of brilliance, of gritty reality combined with symbols that are simple enough to understand and yet are piercing and profound. Maus holds its own in the worlds of serious literature and comic books-- If a book could be viewed as "exile", this one certainly would be. It is easy to scan and read, and at the same time it is deeply personal, complicated, and revealing. Human nature-- its potential for evil, its idiosyncrasies, its goodness-- is studied in detail in Spiegelman's work, and the irony lies in the fact that the human condition is presented through 'comical' mouse figures.