Bits & Bytes

BUILDING A BETTER MAUS

One of the oddest yet most moving accounts of the Holocaust is Art Spiegelman's cartoon book, Maus: A Survivor's Tale. Portraying Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, it relates the story of Spiegelman's parents, who made it through the Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland to settle in Rego Park, N.Y. Now, Voyager Co., a New York-based publisher of electronic books, is coming out with a multimedia CD-ROM version of Maus that expands on the original with loads of additional visual and audio material.

The $39.95 disk includes the black-and-white drawings that made up Maus's original two volumes, My Father Bleeds History and And Here My Troubles Began. It also contains copies of Spiegelman's preliminary drawings and a narration by him of how he went about creating the widely acclaimed book. Most interesting of all for Maus fans, though, is that they can now listen to parts of the original recordings that Spiegelman made of his cantankerous father, Vladek, recalling his life before and during the war.EDITED BY JOHN. W. VERITY