A cartoon allegory for World War II has been banned from schools in Tennessee for showing a nude mouse.

Mice don’t wear clothes.

Maus by Art Spiegelman is the biggest story in the book-banning craze of the last few months. Spiegelman’s account of his father’s journey through the Holocaust is one of the most critically acclaimed graphic novels of the last 40 years, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. While the book was not specifically designed to teach the Holocaust to children (Spiegelman just has a background in cartoons), its accessible style did make it easy for those of a younger age to at least get a background on the topic, and has been a staple of many summer reading lists (including WHHS) for middle schoolers across the country.

Even if the proposed reasons for banning Maus were nudity and some vulgar language, many believe that this book is being banned for more specific reasons. Books heavily based in the atrocities of WWII have been common at schools, such as The Diary of Anne Frank and The Book Thief, but because of its genre, one that is more commonly marketed to children, the Tennessee school board in question felt Maus to be too much for a potentially younger audience.

The banning of this book is not necessarily any different than the banning of past books, but it did raise a few eyebrows, even those of the author himself. While Spiegelman does not believe that the banning of Maus was rooted in antisemitism, he did believe it had negative implications. “They want to teach the Holocaust, they just want a friendlier Holocaust to teach,” Spiegelman told New York Magazine.

What drives home the backlash against this particular ban is that, within a week following Maus’s ban, it became the #1 most popular book on Amazon’s best sellers list after not even being in the top 1000 before. Comic book stores, such as Nirvana Comics in Knoxville, began donating copies to any student who requested one, as well as setting up online fundraisers to raise money for students to buy their own copies.

This point in particular indicates yet another fallacy in the logic behind book banning. The fact that a book ending up on the banned or challenged book list will make it skyrocket up the charts and have more people invested in it than ever means that maybe the book in question was never really the issue, and the select few who decide it’s worthy of being removed in no way represent the community as a whole.

Ultimately, Maus is just another chapter in a long running story about the ethics of book banning, but it further proves the importance of being aware of the current situation. To those in charge of regulating books, it means being made aware of the significance of removing a book from a school’s shelves and the reasons for doing so. As William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”