After looking at the original version of Spiegelman’s  three page Maus, I think it really is a great thing that he downplayed the idea of the cat and mouse down to just the talking heads on normal human bodies.  I think the original version was still brutal and realistic in it’s own right, but the representation of dehumanization with so many animal references i think took away from the realism and the emotional connectivity a little bit.  I can understand the cat skull instead of the swastika, but there’s a certain degree of realism that one shouldn’t downplay in a re-telling of a story like this.  The swastika shouldn’t be respected, necessarily, but i’m glad he decided to change it back to the real thing for the final version of Maus, because it’s such a powerful symbol that everyone can relate with, so I feel it draws the reader in closer than the kitty litter and cat skulls of the version before.

I do think that picking cats for the Germans really works for the comic, outside of just the predator/prey realm that it exists in with the Jewish Mice.  I’m not a cat person, so maybe my views on cats are a little slanted, but i don’t really care.  Cats seem to be an indifferent race regardless of what they, or any of their owners, do.  They’ll nonchalantly bring dead mice and birds back to their owners, and they really do everything for their own gain, just like a Nazi for his party.  It’s almost as if they embody the worst parts of human personality, which the inhumanity of the Nazis and the holocaust had in spades.