mice or men?

One thing that stuck out at me was the very human-like hand of the spirit of Vladek's dead grandfather on p57. The dead grandfather is rendered as a mouse, but it has an abnormally large human hand protruding from the folds of his robe. And what on earth is that square thing on it'd head. Is it part of its hat?

Anyways, after this observation of the hand, I began noticing that the mice in Maus are not really mice. It is true that they have mouse heads but the rest of their body is pretty much human. They all have hands with five fingers instead of claws. Their bodies are shaped like humans too. On p15, Lucia is depicted in a sexy nightgown where we can see her ample cleavage and voluptuous womanly body. I don't think female mice can have cleavage. Also, not many of the mouse pictures depict the characters with tails. The only one I could find was on p17 where you can see Anja's tail in her photograph. Do the mice walk around with their tails stuffed inside of their pants? I imagine that it would be very uncomfortable.

So what does this mean? That mice with tails are not attractive? Maybe it's Spiegelman's way of humanizing the mice so that we do not forget that in the real Holocaust, real people died. Perhaps he wanted to introduce his concept of depicting his characters as mice and cats, but he still wanted an element of humanness to exist to evoke sympathy from human readers. Or maybe Spiegelman thought it was just easier to draw human bodies doing things instead of mouse bodies.