“A quest for ersatz verisimilitude might have pulled me further away from essential actuality as I tried to reconstruct it,” muses the author of a seminal work of literature about the Holocaust. In a lengthy interview that has just been published, he reveals that his source material included thousands of hours of interviews; a shelf of books in Polish, Yiddish, and Ukrainian; detailed maps of the death camps; and even manuals of shoe repair. No element of the concentration-camp universe has escaped his attention: Confronted by a historian who disputes his depiction of the toilets at Auschwitz, he gleefully points out that he is referring to the lesser-known Auschwitz I, which had actual plumbing, rather than the more notorious Auschwitz II (Birkenau), with only rows of planks over open pits. “Maybe as a way of getting past my own aversion I tried to see Auschwitz as clearly as I could,” he says. “It was a way of forcing myself and others to look at it.”

This writer is not Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, though his work, like theirs, is based in testimony. He is not Piotr Rawicz or H.G. Adler, though he shares their interest in viewing real events through a filter of surrealism. He is not Thomas Keneally, though his work has a quality of the “nonfiction novel” about it; nor is he W.G. Sebald, though his books, like Sebald’s, have been described as a mix of fiction, documentary, and memoir. He is Art Spiegelman, and he has done more than any other writer of the last few decades to change our understanding of the way stories about the Holocaust can be written. Maus, Spiegelman’s “epic story told in tiny pictures” (in the words of Ken Tucker, one of its first reviewers), is now twenty-five years old, and it is testimony to the book’s wide reach that its premise hardly needs to be restated. The idea of a graphic novel about the Holocaust in which the Jews are drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats is as familiar to us now as it was unheard-of to its first readers.

But what is less well known about Maus is the way the book was put together—in a drawn-out process lasting thirteen years and incorporating a vast amount of research. In MetaMaus, a combination book and DVD just published by Pantheon, the artist investigates his own creative process with a comprehensiveness that may well be unprecedented. The book transcribes a long interview with Spiegelman by the literary scholar Hillary Chute, as well as interviews with the artist’s family members and people who knew his parents during the war, reproductions of documents, and a transcript of the original interviews with Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, on which Maus was based. In addition to the full text of Maus itself, with nearly every frame hyperlinked and annotated, the DVD presents thousands of supporting documents interspersed with sketches and studies, accompanied by critical essays on the book and even a home movie taken by Spiegelman and his wife on their second visit to Auschwitz. “Perhaps the only honest way to present such material is to say: ‘Here are all the documents I used, you go through them,’” Spiegelman tells Chute. “‘And here’s a twelve-foot shelf of works to give these documents context, and here’s like thousands of hours of tape recordings, and here’s a bunch of photographs to look at. Now, go make yourself a Maus!’”

Of course, no one else could make a Maus. One of the book’s most striking qualities is how relentlessly personal it is: The story of Vladek’s persecution and survival is inseparable from the story of his son’s efforts to portray it on the page. “The subject of Maus is the retrieval of memory and ultimately, the creation of memory,” Spiegelman says. “It’s about choices being made, of finding what one can tell, and what one can reveal, and what one can reveal beyond what one knows one is revealing.” The panels of Maus are so straightforward that it’s easy to overlook the wrenching act of imagination required to fit so much material into such a compact space. Spiegelman’s painstaking working process required eight steps to compress the interviews with his father from transcript to finished page. The DVD version brings things full circle by embedding clips of these interviews on some of the relevant pages. Readers can now hear exactly what got left out and try to discern the ways Spiegelman supplemented the missing words in his drawings. At the very least, this is an impressive pedagogical tool, even if all but the most dedicated scholars will ultimately weaken under the flood of documentation. (MetaMaus will no doubt birth thousands of undergraduate term papers.)