Why Mice?

Art Spiegelman chose to draw Jews as mice when he first worked on a comic with fellow comic-writers called, "Funny Animals." I think this is where he learned that animals could be used to convey strong messages, just as well as drawing humans, or perhaps, animals do a better job of it. He read, "The External Jew," while doing research for his book and found that it portrayed Jews in a ghetto, and compared it to a picture of mice/rats in a sewer, with the caption, "Jews are rats." Here, Spiegelman decided that he really liked the use of mice as a metaphor because of how dehumanizing the thought is, just like what Jews really went through during the Holocaust. He also chose mice because they are gassed with the same chemical that Jews were in gas chambers. Additionally, he chose to draw Nazis as cats because of the obvious cats-chasing-mice scenario. He originally planned to make the cats very large in comparison the small mice, but decided against it for it would bring up another metaphor for discussion, of mice, or Jews, being weak and defenseless. He wanted to equalize them biologically, but not through power.