1. The removal of Maus from a Tennessee school board curriculum has to be seen as part of larger trends: the current energized right wing bullying of educators, the wave of challenges to allegedly offensive texts especially graphic novels & the longstanding scandal of comics
2. By "the scandal of comics" I mean the long-running discomfort of comics by the various gatekeepers of culture (clergy, parents, libraries, curators, teachers). There have been periodic anti-comics waves globally for over a century.
3. Art Spiegelman himself started reading comics during one the big anti-comics purges in the early 1950s: the moral panic that lead to comic book burnings (pushed by PTA & clergy), a Senate investigation of industry & creation of straight-jacket code. 
4. Spiegelman's own career can be seen as constant reflection of scandal of comics: like many 1950s kids who saw anti-comics purge, he gravitated towards counter-culture, where underground comix were the return of the repressed.
5. The underground comix love of the transgressive (sexual, scatological, psychedelic) has to be seen as part of Oedipal revolt by kids who were mad their parents ripped up their comic books. This Crumb strip from Zap comix makes it pretty explicit.
6. Among that underground cohort, Spiegelman was rare (although not unique) in trying to push the idea of adult comics beyond simple shock of transgression into more formalist attempts to grapple with mature themes: the agenda of RAW, co-founded by Spiegelman & @FrancoiseMouly
7. One irony of all this is that Maus is actually a very discrete & tactful work: Spiegelman uses all sorts of technique (beyond the famous anthropomorphism) to make harsh story comprehensive as a narrative.
8. I talked with comics scholar @charleshatfield about Maus, the history of comics censorship, and the inescapable scandal of comics. jeetheer.substack.com/p/podcast-a-br…
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