Art Spiegelman Signed Kaz Sketch Little Lit Books X3 Autographs 2000 Fantastic

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Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (807) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US & many other countries, Item: 176277808895 ART SPIEGELMAN SIGNED KAZ SKETCH LITTLE LIT BOOKS X3 AUTOGRAPHS 2000 FANTASTIC. Finally, though. Harvey Pekar. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Army and his subsequent capture and release by the nazs in 1939; his plans and strategies to. the end of the Second World War.

3 COPIES OF LITTLE LIT GRAPHIC HARDCOVER BOOK EACH SIGNED BY BARBARA MCCLINTOCK, FRANCOISE MOULY, ART SPIEGELMAN AND EACH WITH A SKETCH BY KAX OF A HORSE. ALL BOOKS IN VG-EX CONDITION

ISBN 0-06028624-5

Little Lit: Folklore and Fairy Tale Funnies

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060286245  ISBN 13: 9780060286248

Publisher: A RAW Junior Book / Joanna Cotler Books, 2000 / an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

A treasure and a treasury!

Innovative cartoonist and renowned children's book artists from around the world have gathered to bring you the magic of fairy tales through the wonder of comics. The stories range from old favorites to new discoveries, from the profound to the silly. A treat for all ages, these picture stories unlock the enchanted door into the pleasures of books and reading!

Best Children's Books 2000 (PW)

Review:

These days, most comics really aren't for kids. But Little Lit fixes that with funny and fractured all-ages fairy tales by some of the best comic artists around. Annoying magic pumpkins, a horrible ogre queen, and strangely hungry horses are just some of the strange characters guaranteed to delight both children and adults.

Twelve great tales, some new and some retold classics, with weird and wacky pictures fill the pages of Little Lit. Comic fans will recognize the talents of Dan Clowes, Kaz, Joost Swarte, and many more. Kids will love the unexpected twists on old favorites, like the lions who populate Barbara McClintock's "The Princess and the Pea." Like all good fairy tales, many of these stories have lessons hidden in them. Maus creator Art Spiegelman tells the story of a young prince who finds out he doesn't have to change the thing he likes best about himself in "Prince Rooster." And Harry Bliss's "The Baker's Daughter" finds out the hard way that she shouldn't be stingy.

Walt Kelly's 1943 "The Gingerbread Man" gives today's kids a taste of the comic books of yesteryear. There are even activities, like Charles Burns's "Spookyland" and Bruce McCall's silly "What's Wrong with this Picture?" But the very best part of the whole wonderful package is the hilarious game included on the endpapers. It's called "Fairy Tale Road Rage," and it's beautifully illustrated with the exquisite, nostalgic art of Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan). Players race to complete a silly story. Bedtime was never better! (All ages) --Therese Littleton

About the Author:

The Pulitzer prize winning author of Maus and Maus II, Art Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and grew up in Rego Park, New York. He is also the co-founder/editor of RAW, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comix and graphics and the illustrator of the lost classic The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March. Spiegelman's work has been published in more than sixteen languages and has appeared in The New York Times, Village Voice, and Playboy, among others. He has been a contributing editor and cover artist for The New Yorker since 1992.

Spiegelman attended the High School of Art and Design in New York City and SUNY Binghamton and received an honorary doctorate of letters from SUNY Binghamton in 1995. He began working for the Topps Gum Company in 1966, as association that lasted over twenty years. There he created novelty cards, stickers and candy products, including Garbage Candy, Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids. He began producing underground comix in 1966, and in 1971 moved to San Francisco, where he lived until 1975.

His work began appearing in such publications as East Village Other, Bijou and Young Lust Comix. In 1975-76, he, along with Bill Griffith, founded Arcade, The Comic Revue. His book, Breakdowns, an anthology of his comics, was published in 1977.

Spiegelman moved back to New York City in 1975, and began doing drawing and comix for The New York Times, Village Voice and others. He became an instructor at The School of Visiual Arts from 1979-1987. In 1980, Spiegelman and his wife, Francoise Mouly, started the magazine RAW, which has over the years changed the public's perception of comics as an art form. It was in RAW that Maus was first serialized. In 1986, Pantheon Books published the first half of Maus and followed with Maus II in 1991. In 1994 he designed and illustrated the lost Prohibition Era classic by Joseph Moncure March, The Wild Party. In 1997, Spiegelman's first book for children, Open Me ... I'm a Dog was published by HarperCollins.

Art Spiegelman has received The National Book Critics Circle nomination in both 1986 and 1991, the Guggenheim fellowship in 1990, and a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. His art has been shown in museums and gallery shows in the United States and abroad, including a 1991 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

He and his wife, Francoise Mouly, live in lower Manhattan with their two children, Nadja and Dashiell.


Art Spiegelman is one of the most famous, influential and admired comic artists of all time. He is celebrated for his autobiographical graphic novels which often tackle highly controversial topics, such as the holocaus ('Maus', 1980-1991) and the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks on New York City ('In the Shadow of No Towers', 2002-2003). His signature work 'Maus' reflects on his difficult relationship with his father, who survived Auschwitz. The book is a milestone in the history of comics. He surprised many people with this solemn and deeply moving masterpiece. It became the first comic book to be deemed serious literature and even win a Pulitzer Prize. 'Maus' not only converted countless adults to reading graphic novels, but also inspired numerous other cartoonists to tell their own personal tragedies in comic book form. Spiegelman is also one of the medium's most prominent spokesmen. He drew numerous comics which experimented with content, lay-out and narrative style. He also highlighted several artistic comics in essays, books and lectures. Together with his wife Françoise Mouly he established the groundbreaking magazine Raw (1980-1984, 1986, 1989-1991), which offered comic innovators from all over the world a platform. Few people have done so much to explore and promote the endless creative possibilities of comics, bringing it on par with other media. Above all he elevated its status further than any other comic artist.

Early life

Ihtzak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman was born in 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden, as son of Jewish-Polish immigrants who'd left Poland three years earlier. In 1951 they moved to Norristown, Pennsylvania, settling down in Rego Park, Queens, New York City in 1957. His father was a businessman who, together with his wife, had survived Auschwitz. The rest of their family was executed during the holocaus. Much of their traumas and depressions carried over into Spiegelman's own psyche. At age 20, he suffered a nervous breakdown, which wasn't helped by his frequent use of LSD. He was interned in a mental hospital and learned after his release that his mother had committed suicide. All these events shaped the highly personal and dramatic nature of his work.

Graphic influences (1)

All throughout his life, comics offered Spiegelman escapism. During his childhood they gave him his own identity, because his parents had no affinity with the medium. His father was even blissfully unaware of Dr. Fredric Wertham's witch hunts against comics. As such, the boy could read whatever he wanted, even stuff he wasn't supposed to read at his age, such as the horror and mystery titles published by EC Comics. Among Spiegelman's early graphic influences were Carl Barks, Chester Gould, George Herriman, Lyonel Feininger, Winsor McCay, Jack Cole, Bernard Krigstein, Charles M. Schulz, John Stanley, Will Eisner, Harry Hershfield, Harold Gray, Basil Wolverton and Al Capp. At age 12 he even signed his own primitive gag comics with the name "Art Speg", inspired by Capp. The most profound influence was Mad Magazine, particularly when Harvey Kurtzman was chief editor (1952-1956). Spiegelman loved its healthy disregard for U.S. politics, media, advertising and society in general. Every issue experimented with covers and lay-out. Their comics satirized everything, even other comics. It opened his mind to what comics (magazines) could be and how they could be marketed in an artistically interesting way.

Between 1963 and 1965 Spiegelman studied at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, followed by a study in art and philosophy at Harpur College (1965-1968), which he never finished. During the decade, comics gained more academic interest. Spiegelman started analyzing cartoonists from past and present in the same way one would study a painting or a novel. He felt that some of them were worthy of the name "artist". This naturally led to heated arguments with his professors, who looked down on the medium. Spiegelman nevertheless managed to open up professor Ken Jacobs' mind about Bernard Krigstein's 'Master Race' (1955) in a thought-provoking essay. 'Master Race' was interesting as one of the first comics to deal with the holocaus, but in itself a fascinating visual narrative too. In 1975 Spiegelman would expand on this essay in a new article about Krigstein and 'Master Race'. Likewise, Jacobs liberated Spiegelman from his equally snobbish prejudices against modern art by telling him to look at painters and graphic artists "as if they were cartoonists." Soon Spiegelman warmed up to the work of Pablo Picasso, George Grosz and Otto Dix, though he always remained unimpressed with Roy Lichtenstein. In 1990, when the Museum of Modern Art organized an exhibition about the struggle between comics and high art, titled 'High/Low', Spiegelman was quick to criticize the patronizing way comics were treated. He expressed his anger in a comic strip, 'High Art Lowdown' (1990), published in ArtForum magazine.

'Pop Goes the Poppa -or- the Vengeance of Dr. Speck' (Real Pulp Comics #1).

Underground comix

In 1963 Spiegelman founded his own fanzines, Blasé and Smudge, which ran his first cartoons and comics. A year later he sold his first professional cartoons to The Long Island Post and United Features Syndicate. As a student at Harpur College between 1965 and 1968, he was staff cartoonist and editor for the college newspaper. Halfway the 1960s many of these fanzines grew into counterculture magazines with a special kind of adult comics named "underground comix". The cartoonists tackled many taboo topics, such as politics, vulgar language, drugs, bloody violence and sex. Spiegelman was instantly attracted to the new creative possibilities it offered. He got involved in the scene and met many of the artists who inspired him, including Robert Crumb. Spiegelman illustrated a few covers of The East Village Other in 1969 and made short comics and flyers, such as 'A Flash of Insight' (1965-1966), 'This Is A Sheet Of Paper! Look At It And Touch It' (1967) and 'Yes, Play With Your Cells, and Become Your Own Food' (1967). Most of his early underground comix from the late 1960s and early 1970s appeared in magazines like witzend, Gothic Blimp Works, Bijou Funnies, Young Lust, Real Pulp and Bizarre Sex.

Two 'Wacky Packages', painted by Norman Saunders based on Spiegelman lay-outs.

Topps: Wacky Packages & Garbage Pail Kids

While in college, Spiegelman met Woody Gelman, art director of Topps Chewing Gum, who invited him to join his company as freelance illustrator. In 1966 Spiegelman became Topps' creative consultant. Inspired by Mad Magazine's satirical advertisements, Spiegelman developed a series of parodies of famous brand names and logos, collectable as trading cards and stickers, the so-called 'Wacky Packages' (1967). He designed many of them personally, but also brought in some of his underground comix colleagues, like Kim Deitch, Drew Friedman, Bill Griffith and Jay Lynch, but also George Evans, Norman Saunders, Bhob Stewart and Tom Sutton. Wacky Packages mocked huge corporations and looked so identical to their real advertisements that lawsuits were always a genuine threat. However, Topps kept the trading cards only in roulation for a short while. By the time the companies sent a letter of complaint, the specific cards were already off the market and replaced by other ones. The franchise inspired posters, T-shirts, books, erasers, binders, but also five comic book issues with artwork by Jay Lynch, Joe Simko, Neil Camera and Brent Engstrom. It provided many with a steady income, including Spiegelman himself, while they could still remain true to their anti-establishment ideals.

In 1985 Spiegelman launched another lucrative idea for Topps, namely the 'Garbage Pail Kids' trading cards, though he credited Stan Hart with the basic idea. The cards featured children doing disgusting things. Some were illustrated by Tom Bunk, John Pound and Carole Sobocinski. They were an instant hit among school kids and even spawned a live-action film adaptation, 'The Garbage Pail Kids Movie' (1988), which was not only a colossal box office flop but also widely regarded as one of the worst films of all time. It effectively killed the franchise and in 1989 Spiegelman broke off his partnership with Topps over legal ownership. All the time he had kept his involvement secret, out of fear it would shy away potential readers of 'Maus', if they knew he had created these "gross-out comedy cards".

Comics for nude magazines

From 1969 on Spiegelman made many well-paid erotic cartoons and comics for nude magazines like Cavalier, Gent and Dude. He once applied for Playboy, but his work was rejected. It wasn't until 1978 when Playboy cartoon editor Michelle Urry picked up specific samples of his work for chief editor Hugh Hefner that he was finally allowed inside its pages. With some help of fellow Playboy cartoonists, Spiegelman reworked his art style a bit so it looked more appealing. In December 1978 his gag comic 'Ed Head' (1978-1979, 1981) made its debut. Ed is a man who is all head and lacks a body or limbs. Most of his gags feature him resting on the side of street, begging for money. The first few episodes were all self-contained. From May 1979 on Ed was visited by a fairy god mother (or "fairy god head" as he describes himself) who grants him a few wishes, bringing a longer narrative to the series which seemingly concluded in November of that year. Two years later, in October-November 1981, two more episodes appeared in print, after which 'Ed Head' was discontinued. Spiegelman enjoyed this little gag series because it cost him little effort and he didn't take it all that seriously either.

In January 1979 Spiegelman published a 12-panel pantomime comic, 'Shaggy Dog Story', in Playboy. The story features a woman having sex with a dog, but presented in an amusing way, with stylized visuals. In October he drew 'Jack 'n' Jane' / 'Rod 'n' Randy', a comic presented in two frames, which can be read horizontally as well as vertically. The top frame depicts a man, Jack, who gives a woman in the street, Jane, a tissue after sneezing. In the lower half the man's groin, Rod, has a vulgar conversation with Jane's groin, Randy. Spiegelman and Lou Brooks made 'Teasers' for Playboy's January 1982 issue, which were basically low-brow sex jokes.

Graphic influences (2)

While his sex-related comics were best-sellers, Spiegelman felt most were nothing more but crude masturbation fantasies with shocking images. Ultimately they would never reach general audiences and even among fans the novelty was bound to wear off. He admired female underground artists like Mary K. Brown, Aline Kominsky and Diane Noomin who created titles like It Ain't Me, Babe and Wimmen's Comix in reaction to all the misogynistic stories in the male-dominated underground milieu. Three male underground cartoonists convinced him even further that adult comics could tell mature stories too. Rory Hayes was an amateurish artist, but managed to tell compelling stories despite these graphic limits. It gave Spiegelman more confidence in his own limited graphic skills. He also cited Robert Crumb and Justin Green as major inspirations, because during the early 1970s they both moved to more personal comics about their family background and psychological issues. Particularly Justin Green's graphic novel 'Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary' (1971) influenced him deeply, because it examined Green's Catholic upbringing and sexual guilt complexes.

From the original 'Maus' story (1972).

Maus (1)

He got in touch with Justin Green and in 1971, when Green moved out of his apartment in San Francisco, Spiegelman moved in. A year later Green approached him to make a graphic contribution to the one-shot underground comic book Funny Animals (1972). The title was meant ironically, since all the stories about anthropomorphic animals were intended for mature audiences. It was here that Spiegelman made a first attempt at an autobiographical comic strip. It already dealt with his father's holocaus past under the title 'Maus', and used a cat-and-mouse metaphor. The Jews were depicted as mice, while the Germans are cats. Using animals as stand-ins for humans is as old as mankind itself, and humans have often felt sympathy towards tiny creatures victimized by predators. But Spiegelman also picked out mice because naz propaganda often compared Jews to vermin, like the infamous scene in the propaganda film 'Der Ewige Jude' (1941) where footage of Jews is intercut with footage of rats in a sewer. While the basic concept of 'Maus' was already there, this embryonic version still looked vastly different. The 1972 version is only three pages long and limited to a Jewish father telling his son anecdotes about his war traumas as a bedtime story. The drawing style is also more cartoony, while all direct references to Spiegelman himself are absent. Here the little boy is even called Mickey. Nevertheless Spiegelman abandoned the project again for the next five years. The 1972 'Maus' was reprinted three years later in 'Comix Book', an underground comix anthology published by Marvel.

'Prisoner on the Hell Planet'.

Short Order Comix

In 1972 Spiegelman created 'Zip-a-Tunes and Moire Melodies Featuring Skeeter Grant's Skinless Perkins', which appeared in Zip-a-Tunes and Moire Melodies (San Francisco Comic Book Company), with the intention to look like a Tijuana Bible. A year later the story was reprinted in Short Order (1972-1974), an underground comix magazine co-edited by Spiegelman, Justin Green and Bill Griffith. Spiegelman's most memorable comic for this publication, 'Prisoner on the Hell Planet' (1972), appeared in issue #1. The four-page story deals directly with the effect his mother's suicide in 1968 had on himself and his father. Inspired by 20th-century woodcut artists like Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward, Spiegelman used distorted visuals, shadows and black-and-white contrasts to provide a more visually inventive lay-out. 'Prisoner on the Hell Planet' can be considered his first masterpiece in the sense that it actually impacted its readers. His father once stumbled upon it and felt quite distraught about the memories it brought back. In 1975 Françoise Mouly also read it and was so moved that she and Spiegelman hung out more, becoming a couple.

In other comics in Short Order, Spiegelman experimented with narrative techniques and lay-out. In issue #2 (1974), for instance, he made the story 'Don't Get Around Much Anymore', where a string of seemingly disconnected panels are combined with neutral comments about different topics. It gives the comic strip the same feeling of a literary or cinematic stream-of-consciousness scene. Other comics were more humorous, such as the film noir parody 'Ace Hole, Midget Detective', which appeared in the same issue. The witty story stars a little person who works as a private investigator. He then follows a Cubist painting walking through the streets, which leads to all kinds of visual jokes.

Arcade

In the spring of 1975, Bill Griffith, his wife Diane Noomin and Spiegelman established Arcade, a more professional underground comix magazine. It attracted many big names from the underground scene and provided Spiegelman with an outlet for even bolder graphic experiments. Some of his comics were inspired by dreams, such as 'A Hand Job' (issue #1) and 'Real Dream' (issue #2). Others were more challenging works. In the second issue Spiegelman also published 'Day at the Circuits' (1975), which depicts two drunks in a bar. The story has no clear beginning or ending. Each panel has an arrow pointing to other panels. No matter what direction the reader follows: each makes sense as a self-contained story. Some short, others longer. This also fits the comic's theme, since alcoholics also find themselves stuck in never-ending spirals. The work is a clever narrative masterpiece, which proved how much Spiegelman had grown as a cartoonist. In the 6th issue he cut out scenes from Nicholas P. Dallis' newspaper comic 'Rex Morgan: M.D.', drawn by Marvin Bradley, and juxtaposed them with different images. This collage comic, 'Nervous Rex the Malpractice Suite' (1976), plays with optical illusions and different scenes flowing into one another. While Arcade sold well, Spiegelman moved back to New York City near the end of the year. He became less involved with the production and the magazine was discontinued after only 7 issues.

'Day at the Circuits' (Arcade #2).

Life and career at the end of the 1970s

In the mid-1970s Spiegelman met Françoise Mouly, a Frenchwoman whom he eventually married in 1977 to help her gain a visum. They shared a passion for comics and their artistic possibilities. Mouly often helped her husband with his essays about the medium. In 1978 Spiegelman found a steady teaching job at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where legends like Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder also taught classes. He taught his students about the history of comics and focused on cartoonists he admired. It led to more demands for lectures, essays, articles and books. In December 1977 a compilation book was released by Bélier Press under the title 'Breakdowns', partially selected by his wife. Unfortunately it didn't sell well, because he wasn't a household name yet and most of the comics were too experimental. Spiegelman came to realize that he was basically working in a small niche, namely experimental stories for underground comix readers. It motivated him to return to more readable narratives, fit for general audiences. Mouly felt that 'Breakdowns' also suffered from bad presentation and marketing. She therefore studied offset printing, becoming very skilled in this profession.

In 1978 the couple travelled to Europe, where they built a network with many magazines, publishers and editors. Through his wife, Spiegelman discovered many European comics he'd never heard about, especially Franco-Belgian, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and British ones. He was amazed that in Europe, comics were not only taken more seriously, but that there were genuine adult comic magazines, like L'Écho des Savanes, Fluide Glacial and (Á Suivre). In the U.S., on the other hand, the only real adult comic magazine that wasn't porn was Heavy Metal... a translation of the French Métal Hurlant!

'Two-Fisted Painters'.

Raw

Realizing they'd better fulfill the need themselves, the couple established their own publishing company, Raw Books & Graphics (1978). They distributed postcards, comics and maps, of which the 'Streets of SoHo Map and Guide' proved to be the most lucrative. The map sold advertising space to merchants in the Soho neighbourhood in Manhattan, New York City, and had to be updated annually, thus providing Raw with cash on a regular basis. In July 1980 Mouly and Spiegelman went one step further and founded their own annual magazine: Raw. It presented itself as an alternative comic magazine for more experimental artists. Thanks to Mouly's connections in Europe and Spiegelman's link with the alternative scene in the USA, Raw had a global outlook and thus a worldwide readership. With its top-notch print quality and classy image, its content looked much better than the grudgy underground magazines of yesteryear. All while still appealing to cult audiences too - like the tagline summarized: "Now it's safe for adults to read comics... or is it?" - Raw lasted until 1991, with a hiatus in 1985 and 1987-1988. Dozens of cartoonists owe their international career to the magazine. The same went for many European and Japanese cartoonists who received their first English translation. It also helped the medium being taken more seriously outside comics circles.

Mouly and Spiegelman were co-editors, with Robert Sikoryak joining in as associate editor in 1985. Spiegelman occasionally colored and translated some of the comics, but the majority of Raw was mostly Mouly's labour of love. He designed the cover of the very first issue, doing the same for issue #7 (May 1985) and 9 (July 1989). Naturally he created a few exclusive one-shot comics for the magazine as well. In the first issue (July 1980) Spiegelman created the two-parter 'Two-Fisted Painters'/'The Matisse Falcon', which simultaneously spoofed superhero comics as well as the art industry. A few pages further, one could read 'Drawn Over Two Weeks While on the Phone', an experimental comic strip made from unconnected panels where each speech/thought balloon is unreadable due to the use of squares and triangles. In the fifth issue (March 1983) the cartoonist toyed around with speech balloons again in the more self-reflexive 'One Row'. Spiegelman provided a free-spirited adaptation of Bin Labutau's 'In Search of Eden', titled 'An Aborigine Among the Skyscrapers' in the next issue (May 1984). Along with Ever Meulen and Charles Burns he created 'The Passion of Saint Sluggo', a crossover deconstruction of Ernie Bushmiller's 'Nancy' (issue #7, 1985), while making a solo parody of Chester Gould's 'Dick Tracy' with 'Dead Dick' (issue #9, 1989). In the final issue of Raw Spiegelman created 'Lead Pipe Sunday' (1991). Most of these one-shots were signed with the pseudonym "Spieg". But his most famous comic strip in Raw was, of course, 'Maus', consequently the only serialized comic in the magazine. From the second issue until the final it was prepublished in its pages, leaving only the final chapter for people to buy the book.

'Maus 1'.

Maus

Since 1978 Spiegelman had revisited his 'Maus' concept, when his father casually told him more anecdotes about his life in the 1930s and 1940s. This motivated him to find out the entire story, recording their conversations on tape, while also talking to his dad's friends and relatives. Spiegelman documented himself thoroughly about the time period and Auschwitz, even visiting the camp twice in 1979 and 1987. However, right from the start, it was a highly ambitious and controversial project. Adapting one of the worst human tragedies in history in a medium generally associated with "children's stories" was a bold undertaking. Using anthropomorphic animals was even riskier. In fact, Spiegelman once admitted that Raw was partially founded because no other magazine dared to run 'Maus'!

Yet, as he did his research, Spiegelman actually discovered animal comics about World War II made during the conflict, namely Horst Rosenthal's 'Mickey à Gurs' (1941) and Calvo's 'La Bête est Morte!' (1944). Especially 'Mickey à Gurs' baffled him, because it was a comic made by a POW camp inmate starring Mickey Mouse visiting the very camp he was imprisoned in. Even the idea of an artistic comic strip about the holocaus had a predecessor in the aforementioned 'Master Race' (1956) by Bernard Kriegstein, although this was a mere short comic story. It strengthened him in the belief that his plans weren't that far-fetched. Using anthropomorphic animals also rid him from the problem of visualizing people his father described to him, but whom he never encountered. The animalistic faces helped him keep some emotional distance from the severely depressing subject matter as well. Still, Spiegelman was careful in capturing the right mood. While drawing he played music by the 1927-1933 German-Jewish vocal group the Comedian Harmonists. He studied photos and artwork by camp survivors like Paladij Osynka, Alfred Kantor, Mieczyslaw Koscielniak and Waldemar Nowakowski. Looking for anthropomorphic animal artists, he modelled his characters after imagery from J.J. Grandville, Louis Wain and especially Carl Barks. Barks' 'Donald Duck' stories were essentially "funny animal comics", but his characters behaved like believable human beings, thus making readers forget that they were looking at talking ducks and dogs. Spiegelman also imitated the way Uncle Scrooge's pince-nez was drawn to depict his father's glasses in 'Maus'. In an early stage, Spiegelman drew everything in a luscious style, inspired by the woodcuts of Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward, but soon abandoned this, because the visuals were too distracting. He eventually settled on a sober, scratchy style which fit the somber tone. The earliest pages still show very animalistic mice, complete with whiskers and a tail. But gradually they evolve into humans with stylized animal heads.

Like the tagline explains, 'Maus' is a survivor's tale. Spiegelman's father Vladek tells his son about his life in 1930s Warsaw, how he met his wife Anja and raised a family. When Hitler occupies the country in 1939, all Jewish citizens are systematically persecuted or forced into hiding. Vladek and Anja manage to escape for a long while, though many of their friends and relatives are deported, killed and never seen again. At the end of the first volume the couple is captured and sent to Auschwitz. Their gruesome experiences in the death camp and eventual reunion unfold in the second volume. Apart from being a powerful family chronic about a black page in history, 'Maus' is also a psychological study about a troubled father-son relationship. Spiegelman doesn't romanticize his father, nor himself. Vladek is obviously scarred by numerous traumatic events. He is neurotic, stingy and wants everything to be in order. Money ought to be saved at all costs. Nothing is allowed to be thrown away. But he nevertheless wants his son to be and look well off. Spiegelman struggles to comprehend the horrors his dad endured. At times he doesn't understand his actions in the past, nor in the present time. Vladek constantly complains about his new wife, which sometimes delves into paranoia. He is obviously emotionally manipulative and sees no hypocrisy in being racst to black people, while barely having survived racial discrimination himself. Spiegelman shows his own negative side as well. He is too impatient to deal with his father's nagging. Sometimes he yells at him. Other times he downright lies to avoid doing chores. The artist even shows his own manipulative behavior, as he has less interest in his father's needs and more in finding out the rest of his holocaus past. Spiegelman also portrays his own guilt and insecurities, to the point that he visits a psychiatrist. He also wonders whether 'Maus' as a concept isn't just too complex and over-reaching...

'Maus 2'.

In order to reach audiences who normally didn't read comics, Spiegelman envisioned 'Maus' as a literary book, divided into chapters. Most of the plot is told in flashbacks, with present-day narration by Vladek. He kept the reading rhythm in check at all times. Many pages were sketched and re-sketched for hours, in search of the right page composition. The lay-out had to be easy to follow. The speech balloons weren't allowed to look crammed and the images had to look understandable. Spiegelman also took full advantage of the comics medium. The lay-out on some pages is visually clever. In one scene a long line of prisoners waiting for food is divided over three panels, but actually one continuous drawing when seen from a distance. Other images use visual metaphors, such as the swastika-shaped path that waits ahead of Vladek and Anja. Above all, Spiegelman's simple but effective drawings manage to suggest the real-life events behind the animalistic characters. Vladek's gut-punching commentary makes them resonate even longer.

Success & cultural impact

Since 'Maus' ran in Raw, it was mostly unknown the outside world until Ken Tucker, a critic for The New York Times, noticed it and gave it an enthusiastic review. His readers got curious and wondered where they could buy this book, which at that moment hadn't appeared yet! The media buzz motivated Pantheon Books in 1986 to publish the first volume. The second followed in 1991. 'Maus' was an instant critical and commercial success. While Will Eisner's 'Contract with God' (1978) had already set general acceptance of graphic novels into motion, 'Maus' became the first to solidify it. Jules Feiffer and Umberto Eco praised it. The work was accepted in intellectual circles as genuine literature. Its multi-layered narrative invites repeated readings and academic study. 'Maus' is nowadays part of any self-respecting library and one of the few comics acceptable for school book reports and university theses. In 1991 it became the first and still only comic book to win a Pulitzer Prize! But 'Maus' also reached general audiences, many which normally didn't read comics. The book was translated in more than 30 languages, including German, Polish, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Just like the original English-language publication all translations have kept Vladek's broken English and incorrect sentence structures intact.

Spiegelman was, of course, amazed that the comic he worked on for more than 12 years became such a literary success. It made him able to quit his teaching job. He received numerous commercial offers, but refused all attempts at merchandising, including film or cartoon adaptations. To him 'Maus' only works in comics format. He is also very protective of how the book is presented in the media, once taking action to make sure it is sold in the "non-fiction" section. In 2012 the French publishing company Flammarion sued a parody of 'Maus' by the Belgian company La Cinquième Couche, which plagiarized the entire book only to draw cats' heads over each mouse head. The "artist" behind this pointless work remains anonymous, but is presumed to have been Illan Manouach.

In 1994 the Voyager Company published a CD-Rom, 'The Complete Maus', which combined Spiegelman's original graphic novel with never-before-seen archive material, family photos, historical documentation and commentary. This was expanded upon in 2011 with 'MetaMaus', which offers the same background material, but with extensive interviews, essays and two bonus DVDs worth of audio and video recordings, including Spiegelman's original conversations with his father. He made it all available to the public to avoid having to answer the same questions about 'Maus' forever, and finally focus on other projects. Indeed, the success of his signature work left him with less time to draw new comics. Even the few works he made afterwards never reached the same amount of praise. Spiegelman expressed his mixed feelings about all this in a comic titled 'Mein Kampf', published in The New York Times Magazine on 12 May 1996.

The New Yorker

Between 1991 and 2002 Spiegelman was creative designer and columnist for The New Yorker. He contributed cartoons, illustrations and thematic one-shot comics. Some were interviews or essays about artists like Harvey Kurtzman, Maurice Sendak ('In the Dumps', 27 September 1993, on which Sendak collaborated as well), and Charles M. Schulz ('Abstract Thought is a Warm Puppy', 14 February 2000). Others dealt with more political issues, such as neonaz violence in Rostock, Germany ('A Jew in Rostock', 7 December 1992). Yet Spiegelman caught most attention with his often highly controversial magazine covers. Some even had to be slightly altered in order to be published. His 'Valentine Day' cover (15 February 1991) showed a rabbi kissing a black woman, in reference to the race riots between Jews and African-Americans in Crown Heights, NYC. The illustration conveyed a pacifist message, but many readers misinterpreted as either being rcist and/or depicting a rabbi visiting a prostitute. Four years later a lot of dust rose again when Spiegelman drew 'Theology of the Tax Cut' (17 April 1995), which showed the Easter Bunny crucified in front of a tax document, satirizing the annual tax innings at Easter. Many religious readers sent a letter of protest, including the Christian Anti-Defamation League. The cartoonist caused uproar again on 8 March 1999, with a cover depicting a policeman aiming at regular civilians in a shooting gallery. His cover, 'Fears of July' (8 July 2002), was criticized too for depicting an atomic mushroom cloud during fireworks at Independence Day.

Other covers received more positive feedback. Saul Steinberg praised his 1996 cover 'Family Values', depicting a happy family of marginals. Spiegelman was also praised for his iconic cover in remembrance of the victims of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. In reality, he merely came up with the initial idea, while his wife Françoise Mouly (who was art editor of the magazine since 1993) streamlined the design. On first glance, the cover appears to be completely black. But on closer inspection one can see the contours of the World Trade Center towers in a slightly lighter shade of black. Mouly still gave her husband credit, though, because he "came up with the creative spark". A compilation of Spiegelman's work for The New Yorker can be read in 'Kisses From New York' (Penguin Books, 2006), featuring a foreword by novelist Paul Auster.

Little Lit

Spiegelman and Mouly were also responsible for the 'Little Lit' anthologies, of which three volumes were published by HarperCollins between 2000 and 2003: 'Little Lit: Folklore & Fairy Tale Funnies' (2000), 'Strange Stories for Strange Kids' (2001) and 'It Was a Dark and Silly Night' (2003). The series collected artistically crafted comic stories aimed at children; not only by Spiegelman and other former Raw artists, but also by prominent authors and illustrators of children's books. In 2006 a selection from the original three books was published under the title 'Big Fat Little Lit' by Puffin Books.

In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman

'In the Shadow Of no Towers'.

In the Shadow of No Towers

As New York citizens Spiegelman and Mouly were in the city on the day of the 9/11 2001 terrorist attacks. Their children went to school not far from the World Trade Center. After much panic and chaos they eventually discovered that the principal had already evacuated the school, hours before the towers started to collapse. Although his family survived, Spiegelman was just as traumatized and depressed as his fellow citizens. The only thing that gave him escapism were old comics. This convinced him to express his feelings in a comic strip, since "tragedy seems to be my muse". 'In the Shadow of No Towers', as his comic was titled, is mostly a series of anecdotes and satirical metaphors. The first few pages deal with how he personally experienced that dramatic day and the effect its aftermath had on ordinary citizens. Since Spiegelman has always been a slow worker, the completion of new episodes took a while. As the months rolled by, the comic strip gradually became more politically charged, criticizing blind patriotism, president Bush Jr., his "War on Terror" and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Because old comics brought the cartoonist relief, Spiegelman added parodies of classic 1900s newspaper comics, reimagined in the post 9/11 climate. Among the spoofed series are Winsor McCay's 'Little Nemo', George McManus' 'Bringing Up Father', Gustave Verbeck's 'The Upside Downs', Frederick Burr Opper's 'Happy Hooligan' and Rudolph Dirks' 'Der Katzenjammer Kids'.

'In the Shadow of No Towers', as his 9/11 comic was titled, was Spiegelman's first big project in a decade. Ever since the conclusion of 'Maus' in 1991, most of his comics had been one-shots of barely a page long. He tried to prepublish 'In the Shadow of No Towers' in the New Yorker, but his editors felt some scenes had to be censored because they were too politically charged. They also claimed that they weren't too keen on serialized comics, since the New Yorker is known for stand alone cartoons. Spiegelman soon found out that no other U.S. magazine dared to publish it either. In Europe he found a more receptive market. 'In the Shadow of No Towers' debuted in the German newspaper Die Zeit in 2002, and also ran in the British paper The Independent and the French weekly Courrier International. Eventually the only U.S. publication to pick it up was the Jewish Daily Forward. In 2003 Spiegelman quit The New Yorker. When the 2004 presidential elections were near, he rushed a book publication of 'In the Shadow of No Towers' in the hope of influencing some U.S. voters. The only problem was that the book was still rather short, so Spiegelman added some reprints of old newspaper comics with coincidental thematical connections to the 9/11 attacks. Despite Spiegelman's efforts, Bush was re-elected, but the comic book did inspire composer Mohamed Fairouz to write his symphony 'In The Shadow Of No Towers'.

Political controversy

In the years that followed, Spiegelman became more outspoken in his views regarding rcism, religion, censorship, U.S. politics and freedom of speech. In June 2006 he wrote an article for Harper's Magazine, regarding the then recent public outrage over a series of cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten which depicted the Prophet Muhammad. The essay, 'Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage', looked back at the history of cartoon censorship and made a stance against it. His article unfortunately had trouble finding publication. In January 2015 editors of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were murdered by terrorists for ridiculing Muhammad. It once again sparked debates about the freedom of speech. Spiegelman made a one-shot comic, 'Notes From a First Amendment Fundamentalist', in which he expressed "the right to be offended in cartoons".

In 2019 Spiegelman wrote a foreword titled 'Golden Age Superheroes Were Aided By The Rise of Fascism'. It was intended for 'Marvel: The Golden Age 1939-1949', a deluxe compilation of classic Marvel Comics by the Folio Society. In this prologue he spoke about how the earliest U.S. superhero comics were mostly written, drawn and published by artists who, during World War II, pitted the characters against nazs and Fascists in propaganda-themed comics. Spiegelman concluded his text by drawing a parallel with present times when global raism and fascism rose again and "an Orange Skull haunts America". This reference to U.S. President Donald Trump (who has a notable orange tan) didn't go unnoticed by Marvel's editors and they asked Spiegelman to remove it, as the company wanted to be apolitical. Spiegelman then withdrew his commission and offered his essay to the newspaper the Guardian on 16 August of that year, who made the controversy public. Spiegelman pointed out that Marvel Entertainment chairman Isaac "Ike" Perlmutter is a longtime friend and public supporter of Trump, which explained the censorship.

'Breakdowns - Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!'.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!

In 2008 Spiegelman and the publishing house Pantheon relaunched his 1978 comic book compilation 'Breakdowns', but added a longer and more recent comic strip, 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!' (2005-2006), originally published in the Virginia Quarterly Review. 'Portrait' is a non-chronological overview of his life, told in comic strip form. It could be described as a personal "coming-of-age" tale, focusing on key moments which had a profound impact on his way of thinking. Among these are the first time he discovered Mad Magazine and EC Comics, but also things his parents told him that he never forgot. Spiegelman shows how a cheap marketing trick disappointed him as a kid and made him "discover America". He also included moments early in his career when he was still trying to find his own voice. Like his original conception of 'Maus' as a metaphor for African-American history of raist repression through cats and mice, only to realize he knew nothing about it and kept brainstorming what other direction he could take with the idea. Another selection of Spiegelman's work was published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2013 under the title 'Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps'.

Children's book illustrations

Spiegelman has so far written and illustrated three children's books, namely 'Open Me I'm a Dog' (1995), 'Jack and the Box' (2008) and 'Be A Nose' (2009). While they are technically picture books, he made use of the comic strip format. 'Open Me, I'm a Dog', published by HarperCollins, sparked off a far more ambitious publishing company, Toon Books, run by his wife, Françoise Mouly. Toon Books publishes child friendly and educational picture books, illustrated by professional comic artists. All his children's books have since then been published by Toon Books.

The Several Selves of Selby Sheldrake, by Art Speigelman 2001

'The Several Selves of Selby Sheldrake', from Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids (2001)

Graphic contributions

In 1971 Spiegelman paid tribute to Don Dohler in the collective homage album 'ProJunior' (Krupp Comic Works). More than 20 years later he illustrated a 1994 reprint of the 1923 poem 'The Wild Party' by Joseph Moncure March. On 3 August 1999 political cartoonist Ted Rall criticized Spiegelman's power of influence in the cartoon industry through an article published in the Village Voice. While Spiegelman himself didn't react to it, cartoonist Danny Hellman did. He mailed 35 cartoonists and editors, pretending to be Rall, only to reveal a satirical hoax letter. When Rall sued for libel, Hellman published two comic books, 'Legal Action Comics' (2001, 2003) to finance the costs of his trial. Spiegelman, feeling somewhat responsible for the whole brouhaha, joined several other famous cartoonists to make a graphic contribution titled 'Sketchbook Drawings' in the second volume.

Books and essays

Apart from comics, Spiegelman is just as famous as a comics essayist. He and Bob Schneider edited the best-selling quotations manual 'Whole Grains: A Book of Quotations' (1973). On his own he also edited David Mazzucchelli's 1994 graphic novelisation of Paul Auster's novel 'City of Glass' (1994). Together with Robert Sikoryak he co-edited 'The Narrative Corpse' (1995), a crossover comic in which 69 cartoonists (many from RAW) create a chain story, where one artist takes over from where the previous artist left off. Spiegelman contributed the foreword to 'Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America's Forbidden Funnies' (1996), about the history of Tijuana Bibles, and to a 2010 compilation of the work of Lynd Ward, 'Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts' (2010). He wrote the self-reflecting article 'Getting in Touch with My Inner Raist' for the 1 September 1997 issue of Mother Jones. An article about Jack Cole published in The New Yorker on 8 March 1999, 'Forms Stretched To Their Limits: What Kind of Person Could Have Dreamed Up Plastic Man?', eventually became a complete biography about the cartoonist: 'Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits' (Chronicle Books, 2001), co-written with Chip Kidd.

comic art by Art Spiegelman

Recognition

Art Spiegelman might be one of the most honoured and awarded cartoonists of all time. He won the Playboy Editorial Award (1982) for Best Comic Strip and a Yellow Kid Award for Best Foreign Author (1982). Between 1983 and 1985 he received three consecutive Regional Design Awards, followed by the Joel M. Cavior Award for Jewish Writing (1986). He won two Urhunden Prizes for Best Foreign Album, respectively in 1988 and 1993. At the Festival of Angoulême he received the Prize for Best Comic Book twice, in 1988 and 1993. The same festival honored him in 2011 with a Grand Prix d'Angoulême for his entire career. After winning an Eisner Award (1992) he was inducted in the Eisner Award Hall of Fame (1999) before the decade was over. Spiegelman furthermore added an Inkpot Award (1987), Max und Moritz Award (1990), Pulitzer Prize Letters Award (1992), Harvey Award (1992), Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction (1992), Sproing Award (1993), National Jewish Book Award (2011) and Edward MacDowell Medal (2018) to his honors list. The Binghamton University gave him a honorary doctorate of Letters (1995), while the French government named him Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2005) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters made him a honorary member in 2015.

Media appearances

Spiegelman was one of many famous cartoonists to be interviewed in the documentary film 'Comic Book Confidential' (1988). Along with Daniel Clowes and Alan Moore he was special guest voice in Matt Groening's 'The Simpsons', namely the episode 'Husbands and Knives' (2007).

Art Spiegelman

Legacy and influence

Art Spiegelman remains one of the most famous and widely respected cartoonists in the world. Daniel Clowes even satirized him as Gummo Bubbleman in 'Pussey' (1989-1994). Spiegelman made many people look at comics with different eyes. His experimental comics and thought-provoking essays were a strong influence on Scott McCloud's 'Understanding Comics' (1993). 'Maus' paved the way for other autobiographical graphic novels about real-life tragedies, such as Joe Kubert's 'Yossel' and Dave Sim's 'Judenhaas', which also deal with the holocaus, but also works like Marjane Satrapi's 'Persepolis', Alison Bechdel's 'Fun Home', Joe Sacco's 'Palestine' and Chris Ware's 'Jimmy Corrigan'. Spiegelman was also an influence on Blexbolex, Cosey, Emil Ferris, Matt Groening, Jean-Louis Lejeune, Ulli Lust, Stewart Kenneth Moore, Wilfred Ottenheijm, Mimi Pond, Thierry van Hasselt, Katrien Van Schuylenbergh, Ted Stearn and Chris Ware.

Books about Art Spiegelman

For those interested in Spiegelman's life and career, Joseph Witek's 'Conversations' (University Press of Mississippi, 2007) contains many interviews with the maestro.

Françoise Mouly (French: [muli]; born 24 October 1955)[1] is a Paris-born New York-based designer, editor, and publisher. She is best known as co-founder, co-editor, and publisher of the comics and graphics magazine Raw (1980–1991), as the publisher of Raw Books and Toon Books, and since 1993 as the art editor of The New Yorker. Mouly is married to cartoonist Art Spiegelman, and is the mother of writer Nadja Spiegelman.

As editor and publisher, Mouly has had considerable influence on the rise in production values in the English-language comics world since the early 1980s. She has played a role in providing outlets to new and foreign cartoonists, and in promoting comics as a serious artform and as an educational tool. The French government decorated Mouly as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2001, and as Knight of the Legion of Honour in 2011.

Contents

1 Biography

1.1 Early life

1.2 Move to New York

1.3 Raw Books

1.4 The New Yorker

1.5 Raw Junior: Little Lit and Toon Books

2 Recognition

3 References

3.1 Works cited

4 External links

Biography

Early life

Mouly was born in 1955 in Paris, France, the second of three daughters to Josée and Roger Mouly. She grew up in the well-to-do 17th arrondissement of Paris.[2] Her father was a plastic surgeon[3] who in 1951 developed, with Charles Dufourmentel, the Dufourmentel-Mouly method of breast reduction.[4] The French government made him a Knight of the Legion of Honour.[3]

Map of Paris, with the 17th arrondisement, where Mouly grew up, highlighted

Mouly grew up in the 17th arrondissement (in pink) of Paris, France.

From a young age Mouly had a love of reading, including novels, illustrated fairytale collections, comics magazines such as Pilote, and comics albums such as Tintin.[5] She excelled as a student, and her parents planned to have her study medicine and follow her father into plastic surgery. She spent vacation time assisting and observing her father at work.[6] She was troubled with the ethics of plastic surgery, though, which she said "exploits insecurity to such a high degree".[7]

At thirteen, Mouly witnessed the May 1968 events in France. The events led to Mouly's mother and sisters fleeing Paris. Her father stayed to be available to his patients, and Mouly stayed as his assistant. She developed sympathies with the anarchists, and read the weekly radical Hara-Kiri Hebdo.[2] She brought her radical leftist politics with her when her parents sent her in 1970 to the Lycée Jeanne D'Arc in central France, where she has said she was expelled "twenty-four or twenty-five times because [she] was trying to drag everyone to demonstrations".[8]

Mouly's father was disappointed when, upon Mouly's return to Paris, she chose to forgo medicine to study architecture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. She lived with a boyfriend in the Latin Quarter and traveled widely in Europe, took a two-and-a-half-month van trip with friends in 1972 that reached Afghanistan, and made a solo trip to Algeria in 1974 to study the vernacular architecture, during which she was robbed of her passport and money.[9]

Mouly grew disenchanted with the lack of creative freedom a career in architecture would present her. Her family life had grown stressful, and her parents divorced in 1974. The same year, she broke off her studies and worked as a cleaner in a hotel to save money for traveling to New York.[9]

Move to New York

With no concrete plans, Mouly arrived in New York September 2, 1974, with $200 in the midst of a severe economic downturn. She familiarized herself with the New York avant-garde art and film worlds, and had a part in Richard Foreman's 1975 play Pandering to the Masses.[10] She settled into a loft in SoHo in 1975[11] and worked at odd jobs, including selling cigarettes and magazines in Grand Central Station and assembling models for a Japanese architectural company, while struggling to improve her English.[12]

While looking for comics from which to practice reading English, she came across Arcade, an underground comix magazine from San Francisco co-published by New Yorker Art Spiegelman. Avant-garde filmmaker friend Ken Jacobs introduced Mouly and Spiegelman when Spiegelman was visiting, but they did not immediately develop a mutual interest. Spiegelman moved permanently back to New York later in the year. Occasionally the two ran across each other. After reading Spiegelman's 1973 strip "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", about his mother's suicide, Mouly felt the urge to contact him. An eight-hour phone call led to a deepening of their relationship. Spiegelman followed her to France when she had to return to fulfill obligations in her architecture course.[13] After returning to the United States, when Mouly ran into visa problems in 1977, the couple solved them by getting married, first at City Hall, and then again after Mouly converted to Judaism to please Spiegelman's father.[14] Beginning in 1978 Mouly and Spiegelman made yearly trips to Europe to explore the comics scene, and brought back European comics to show to their circle of friends.[15]

Mouly became immersed in Spiegelman's personal theories of comics, and helped him prepare the lecture "Language of the Comics" delivered at the Collective for Living Cinema.[16] She assisted in the putting together the lavish collection of Spiegelman's experimental strips Breakdowns. The printer botched the printing of the book—30% of the print run was unusable. The remaining copies had poor distribution and sales. The experience motivated Mouly to gain control over the printing process, and to find a way to get such marginal material to sympathetic readers.[17] She took courses in offset printing in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and bought an Addressograph-Multigraph Multilith printing press for her loft.[18] During this period, she also worked as a colourist for Marvel Comics, coloring more than 50 issues of various titles.[19]

Raw Books

Main article: Raw Books

Main article: Raw (magazine)

In 1978, she founded Raw Books & Graphics, a name settled on in part because of its small-operation feel, and part because it was reminiscent of Mad magazine. Mouly worked from an aesthetic inspired in part by the Russian Constructivists, who brought a design sense to everyday objects.[20] Raw Books began by publishing postcards and prints by artists such as underground cartoonist Bill Griffith and Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte.[21] More ambitious projects included art objects such as the Zippy-Scope, a cardboard device with to watch a comic strip rolled up on a film spool, featuring Griffth's character Zippy the Pinhead.[22] Some projects were more commercial, such as the annual Streets of SoHo Map and Guide, whose advertising revenue financed much of Raw Books.[23]

Having in this way honed her publishing skills, Mouly's ambition turned to magazine publication. Spiegelman was at first reluctant, jaded from his experience at Arcade, but agreed on New Year's Eve 1979 to co-edit. The magazine was to provide an outlet for the kinds of comics that had difficulty finding a publisher in the US, in particular younger cartoonists who fit neither the superhero nor the underground mold, and European cartoonists who did not fit the sex-and-sci-fi appetites of Heavy Metal fans.[24]

In the midst of a commercial and artistic fallow period in the American comics industry, the lavishly-printed, 10+1⁄2 in × 14+1⁄8 in (27 cm × 36 cm) first issue of Raw appeared in July 1980. Its production values resulted in a $3.50 cover price, several times the going prices for comics, either mainstream or underground. Among the comics it contained was the only strip Mouly herself was to produce, "Industry News and Review No. 6", an autobiographical strip in which she contemplates her late-1970s anxieties and thoughts of suicide.[25] Other strips in the eclectic anthology included an example of the early 20th-century newspaper strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend by Winsor McCay, and an excerpt from Manhattan by contemporary French cartoonist Jacques Tardi.[26] To comics academic Jeet Heer, Raw was "a singular mixture of visual diversity and thematic unity".[27] Each issue contained a broad variety of styles linked by a common theme, be it urban despair, suicide, or a vision of America through foreign eyes.[28] The best-known work to run in Raw was a serialization of Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus,[29] which ran as an insert for the duration of the magazine[30] from the December 1980 second issue.[31]

Mouly's approach was hands-on, and she gave great attention to every step of the printing process. The physicality of Raw was evident in each issue: tipped-in plates, bubblegum cards, and torn covers were part of the aesthetic of the magazine, accomplished by hand by Mouly, Spiegelman, and friends at gatherings after the printing of a new issue.[32] Mouly was also hands-on when dealing with contributors, suggesting ideas and changes—an approach anathema to the editor-adverse underground spirit, but artists welcomed her input as in the end she did not interfere with their autonomy.[33]

Raw had a strong critical reception, and also sold surprisingly well.[34] It was not without its critics, who charged it with being highbrow and elitist,[35] or claimed it to be a one-man Spiegelman show.[36] Pioneer underground cartoonist Robert Crumb responded in 1981 with the magazine Weirdo, intended to remain free of editorial intrusion and stay true to comics' lowbrow roots.[37]

Raw Books published ten One Shot books throughout the 1980s by cartoonists such as Gary Panter, Sue Coe, and Jerry Moriarty. Mouly brought a similar production sensibility to these books to what she brought to Raw: the cover to Panter's Jimbo was corrugated cardboard pasted with stickers of the book's main character.[38] By the end of the decade, Pantheon Books had begun co-publishing Raw Books' output, and Penguin Books had picked up publishing of Raw itself. The three issues of the second volume of Raw came in a smaller, longer format with a changed emphasis on narrative rather than graphics.[39]

Mouly divided her time between publishing and parenthood following the birth of daughter Nadja in 1987. Researching books for Sue Coe motivated her to take up science courses at Hunter College, perhaps toward a neuroscience degree. She abandoned this plan in 1991 when she gave birth to son Dashiell.[39] In 1991, Mouly and Spiegelman published the final issue of Raw, which was no longer a small, hands-on operation, nor was it something they still thought necessary, as the artists then had a range of publishing outlets that had not existed when Raw first saw the light of day.[40]

The New Yorker

Tina Brown became the editor of The New Yorker magazine in 1992, and was intent on changing it from the stolid, conservative image left it by William Shawn's long editorship.[41] (One of Brown's early cover choices provoked controversy — illustrated by Spiegelman for the 1993 Valentine's Day issue,[42] it portrayed a Hasidic man kissing an African-American woman.)[41] Writer Lawrence Weschler recommended Brown consider Mouly for the art editor position;[43] Mouly and Brown met the following March, in 1993.[44] Mouly had reservations about the magazine's reputation for staidness and Brown's politics,[43] but was taken with Brown on a personal level, whom she described as "charismatic, quick-witted, [and] full of energy".[45] Mouly proposed the magazine return to its roots by having artists as featured contributors, an increase in the visuals in the magazine, such as photographs and more illustrations,[46] and covers in the topical style they had had under the magazine's founder Harold Ross.[47] Brown accepted.[46]

Mouly brought a large number of cartoonists and artists to the periodical's interiors, including Raw contributors such as Coe, Crumb, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Chris Ware.[48] The magazine's circulation doubled during Mouly's time there.[49]

A picture of New York City's Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. They are billowing smoke after two planes flew into them.

Mouly and Spiegelman witnessed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Their response was an all-black cover to The New Yorker's subsequent issue.

From their SoHo loft ten blocks away, on September 11, 2001, Mouly and Spiegelman witnessed the first plane of the terrorist attacks crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Four blocks from the towers, daughter Nadja attended Stuyvesant High School. After collecting her, and son Dashiell from the United Nations International School further away, they returned home to telephone messages urging Mouly to get to the New Yorker offices to get to work on a 9-11-themed cover.[50] Mouly put together a cover in two black inks of different density—a black cover overlaid with a black silhouette of the two towers. Mouly gave credit for the cover to Spiegelman, who had suggested the silhouette to Mouly's idea of an all-black cover.[51]

In 2012, Mouly and daughter Nadja edited a collection of rejected New Yorker covers called Blown Covers, made up of cover sketches and covers that were deemed too risqué for the magazine.[52]

Raw Junior: Little Lit and Toon Books

After becoming parents, Mouly and Spiegelman realized how difficult it was at the end of the 20th century to find comics in English appropriate for children.[53] In 2000[54] Mouly responded with the Raw Junior imprint, beginning with the anthology series Little Lit, with a roster of cartoonists from Raw, as well as children's book artists and writers such as Maurice Sendak, Lemony Snicket, and Barbara McClintock. Mouly researched the role comics could play in promoting literacy in young children, and encouraged publishers to publish comics for children.[55] Disappointed by publishers' lack of response, from 2008 she self-published a line of easy readers called Toon Books, by artists such as Spiegelman, Renée French, and Rutu Modan, and promotes the books to teachers and librarians for their educational value.[56] The imprint provides support materials for teachers tied into the Common Core State Standards Initiative. In 2014 Toon Books launched an imprint called Toon Graphics aimed at readers eight and up.[57]

Recognition

Mouly has had a deep impact on the publishing practices of the comics world, though her name is not well known due to the behind-the-scenes nature of her work and the prominence of her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband. To comics critic and historian Jeet Heer, sexism has also played a role in minimizing the acknowledgment she receives.[54] In 2013, Drawn & Quarterly associate publisher Peggy Burns called Mouly "one of the most influential people in comics for 30 years."[54]

In 1989 Mouly and Spiegelman were recognized for their design work on Charles Burns' Hardboiled Defective Stories, which was given the Harvey Awards' Special Award for Excellence in Presentation. In 1991, Mouly and Spiegelman were recognized for their work on Raw when they were given the Harvey Award for Best Anthology. Mouly and Spiegelman's The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics was nominated for the 2010 Eisner Award for Best Publication for Kids.

In 2011, the French government recognized Mouly as a Knight of the Legion of Honour (as her father had been),[52] and the Society of Illustrators bestowed on her the Richard Gangel Art Director Award.[58] At the ninth Carle Honors Awards in 2014 the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art granted Mouly the Bridge Award for promoting children's literature.[59]

Jeet Heer published a biography of Mouly in 2013 titled In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly's Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman.[60] Mouly's daughter Nadja interviewed her and Mouly's mother Josée for the memoir I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This.[61] In 2015, Mouly was the recipient of Smithsonian Magazine's American Ingenuity Award for Education.[62]

Award-winning children’s book author and illustrator Barbara McClintock draws like a dream; her “beautifully restrained use of color may evoke a long-ago time, but her compositions are so dynamic that there's always something for contemporary children to discover.” [Michael Cart, Booklist] Full of humor and wit and strong characterizations, her books are timeless charmers.

Barbara's books have won 5 New York Times Best Books awards, a New York Times Notable Book citation, a Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor award, and numerous other awards, recommended/best book lists, and starred reviews.

Barbara McClintockAs Barbara says about herself...

I was born and spent the first part of my growing up in Clinton, NJ. My early influences were my photographer father, seamstress/teacher mother, and the cartoon character Top Cat.

I drew constantly as a child. By the time I was seven, I knew I would be an artist when I grew up. My older sister recommended I become a children's book illustrator, and this proved to be a rare instance when I followed my sister's advice. I also wanted to be a cat when I grew up, and am glad I had art as a back up plan.

I loved inventing stories - very scary stories - that I told to my best friend and her sisters in the darkest closet in their house. After numerous nights of my friends not being able to sleep due to the aforesaid scary stories, and the ensuing conversations between my friends' mother and my mother, I developed a more benign approach to storytelling.

When I was 9, my parents divorced, and I moved to North Dakota with my mother and sister. When my mother remarried, my step-father, a former cowboy, gave me a horse. I rode from dawn 'til dusk every summer, until I discovered boys. Drawing, however, never stopped - I continued to draw through middle and high school, often in the margins of my test papers and homework.

I attended Jamestown College in North Dakota, where I refined my drawing skills by copying pictures in art books I checked out of my college library.

Way back in the dark ages when I attended college, there were no courses available in children's literature, and I was clueless about how to even begin a career as a children's book author/illustrator. I decided to call Maurice Sendak to ask his advice, thinking that he, of anyone, would know how I should proceed. My art Professor encouraged me to call, telling me I had nothing to worry about. “He'll either be nice and tell you what you want to know, or he'll just hang up.”

I called information in the town where Maurice Sendak lived, got his phone number, and dialed. He answered the phone. Maurice was gracious and very helpful; he talked to me for 20 minutes, told me how to put together a portfolio, and recommended I move to New York City.

Two weeks after my 20th birthday, my best friend took me to the airport in Jamestown, ND, and I flew to New York to begin my career.

I studied for a few months at the Art Student's League in New York with the notable illustrator John Groth, but the method of study that most appealed to me was continuing to copy from art books I checked out of libraries.

And what a vast treasure of art books were available to me once I was in New York! I also sketched paintings and drawings in museums in New York City, as well as London, Paris, St. Louis, Vienna, and Lisbon. I'm essentially self-taught as an artist/illustrator, and can thank the public library system for my free education.

My first job was designing characters for television commercials for an animation studio. I worked as a chef's assistant in a restaurant, failed miserably as a waitress, and illustrated textbooks, until I met Jim Henson and began illustrating books for his television series FRAGGLE ROCK.

During that period, I saw a play based on a Balzac story written as a vehicle for the 19th Century French illustrator J.J. Grandville. That play was the biggest epiphany of my life as an artist. I went home and immediately drew an 87 page sketchbook of the play from memory. Regrettably, the play closed within a week, robbing me of the opportunity to see it again. I made a wordless dummy book based on the story, THE HEARTACHES OF A FRENCH CAT, and took it around to publisher after publisher. Rejected by 16 publishers before it was accepted by David R. Godine, it won my first New York Times Best Books award.

Perhaps I'm a soul reincarnate from the 19th Century, or I just have a fascination with history and period costume; my books dwell in a past world. I've been amply rewarded for my obsession with an older time - ANIMAL FABLES FROM AESOP, THE FANTASTIC DRAWINGS OF DANIELLE, DAHLIA, THE GINGERBREAD MAN, CINDERELLA, and ADELE & SIMON are just a few of my books based in a long-ago time that have won prestigious awards and garnered glowing, sometimes rhapsodic reviews. There is some movement into more contemporary settings for my books. MARY AND THE MOUSE, THE MOUSE AND MARY takes place in the 1950s-1960s, and the 1990s - quite an invigorating departure for me!

Inspiration for my stories comes from my childhood, family and friends. My photographer father created a life-long love and fascination with cameras and picture making. My son Larson has provided inspiration for many of my books - THE BATTLE OF LUKE AND LONGNOSE came of his childhood interest in swords and swashbuckling. As a young adult, his curious mind has led him to a love of China, Mandarin, and Chinese culture and history, and in turn has inspired me in Adele & Simon's next book, set in 1908 China. And my mother's love-since-childhood of Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry culminated in my illustrating A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES for her.

In 2005, the illustrator David Johnson and I moved to a Georgian-style brick house built in 1815 in rural Connecticut. My studio looks out over the ever-expanding rose garden cultivated by David. I 'travel' in time and imagination, to China, France, and my own back yard for inspiration and settings for my books, but am only a few steps away from the coffee pot in my kitchen.

Kaz (born Kazimieras Gediminas Prapuolenis,[1] July 31, 1959) is an American cartoonist, writer, story artist, and illustrator. In the 1980s, after attending New York City's School of the Visual Arts, he was a frequent contributor to the comic anthologies RAW and Weirdo. Since 1992, he has drawn Underworld, an adult-themed syndicated comic strip that appears in many alternative weeklies.

Contents

1 Career

2 Personal life

3 Filmography

3.1 Television

4 Bibliography

5 References

6 External links

Career

Kaz's comics and drawings have appeared in many alternative and mainstream publications including Details, The New Yorker, Nickelodeon Magazine, The Village Voice, East Village Eye, Swank, RAW, Eclipse, N.Y. Rocker, New York Press, Screw and Bridal Guide. He has continued to contribute to comics anthologies such as Zero Zero.

Kaz has also worked on several animated television shows including SpongeBob SquarePants, Camp Lazlo, and Phineas and Ferb. He was co-executive producer of Get Blake!.

Kaz joined SpongeBob SquarePants as a storyboard director and writer in 2001 during the production of the series' third season. The series went on hiatus after production began on The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. Shortly before production on the fourth season began in 2004, Kaz was invited by his colleague and the series' newly appointed showrunner, Paul Tibbitt, to work on an episode for the fourth season but he was never contacted by Tibbitt again and joined Camp Lazlo after leaving SpongeBob.[2] After Phineas and Ferb ended production, Kaz returned to SpongeBob in 2015 as a writer.

With Derek Drymon, Kaz co-wrote and storyboarded the pilot episode for Diggs Tailwagger, which was ultimately not picked up. In September 2006, Kaz left Camp Lazlo to work on another pilot for a Cartoon Network show, Zoot Rumpus, based on a character from Underworld.[3] With Mr. Lawrence, he wrote the episode SpongeBob's Big Birthday Blowout and is currently working on the SpongeBob spinoff Kamp Koral.

Kaz will write the screenplay for the Sandy Cheeks spinoff film, Saving Bikini Bottom, which Tom Stern will also write the film with him.

Personal life

Kaz lives in Hollywood, California, with his spouse Linda Marotta.

Filmography

Television

Year Title Role

2002–04; 2015–present SpongeBob SquarePants Writer, storyboard director, story outlines, animation writer

2005–08 Camp Lazlo Writer, storyboard director, story outlines

2006 Zoot Rumpus Creator, writer, storyboard artist (pilot)

2007 Diggs Tailwagger Co-writer & storyboard artist (pilot)

2009–2013; 2015 Phineas and Ferb Writer & storyboard artist

2012 Secret Mountain Fort Awesome Prop and effects designer ("Funstro")

2014 Get Blake! Executive producer

2018 Little Big Awesome Writer (2 episodes)

2021 Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years Writer (3 episodes), Developer, Theme music composer

Bibliography

Month Title Issue Story Publisher Notes

Dec. 2014 SpongeBob Comics #39 "Grudge with Your Grub" United Plankton Pictures Story

Jan. 2015 #40 "Lavable Pin-Up Comic"

Oct. 2015 #49 "Monster Canyon"

Art Spiegelman (/ˈspiːɡəlmən/; born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman on February 15, 1948) is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman.

Spiegelman began his career with the Topps bubblegum card company in the mid-1960s, which was his main financial support for two decades; there he co-created parodic series such as Wacky Packages in the 1960s and the Garbage Pail Kids in the 1980s. He gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s with short, experimental, and often autobiographical work. A selection of these strips appeared in the collection Breakdowns in 1977, after which Spiegelman turned focus to the book-length Maus, about his relationship with his father, a holocaus survivor. The postmodern book depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice, and ethnic Poles as pigs, and took 13 years to create until its completion in 1991. It won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and has gained a reputation as a pivotal work, responsible for bringing scholarly attention to the comics medium.

Spiegelman and Mouly edited eleven issues of Raw from 1980 to 1991. The oversized comics and graphics magazine helped introduce talents who became prominent in alternative comics, such as Charles Burns, Chris Ware, and Ben Katchor, and introduced several foreign cartoonists to the English-speaking comics world. Beginning in the 1990s, the couple worked for The New Yorker, which Spiegelman left to work on In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), about his reaction to the September 11 attacks in New York in 2001.

Spiegelman advocates for greater comics literacy. As an editor, a teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and a lecturer, Spiegelman has promoted better understanding of comics and has mentored younger cartoonists.

Contents

1 Family history

2 Life and career

2.1 Early life

2.2 Underground comix (1971–1977)

2.3 Raw and Maus (1978–1991)

2.4 The New Yorker (1992–2001)

2.5 Post-September 11 (2001–present)

3 Personal life

4 Style

4.1 Influences

5 Beliefs

6 Legacy

6.1 Awards

7 Bibliography

7.1 Author

7.2 Editor

8 Notes

9 References

9.1 Works cited

10 Further reading

11 External links

Family history

Liquidation at the Sosnowiec Ghetto in occupied Poland during World War II; Spiegelman tells of his parents' survival in Maus.

Art Spiegelman's parents were Polish Jews Władysław (1906–1982) and Andzia (1912–1968) Spiegelman. His father was born Zeev Spiegelman, with the Hebrew name Zeev ben Avraham. Władysław was his Polish name, and Władek (or Vladek in anglicized form) was a diminutive of this name. He was also known as Wilhelm under the German occupation, and upon immigration to the United States he took the name William. His mother was born Andzia Zylberberg, with the Hebrew name Hannah. She took the name Anna upon her immigration to the US. In Spiegelman's Maus, from which the couple are best known, Spiegelman used the spellings "Vladek" and "Anja", which he believed would be easier for Americans to pronounce.[3] The surname Spiegelman is German for "mirror man".[4]

In 1937, the Spiegelmans had one other son, Rysio (spelled "Richieu" in Maus), who died before Art was born[1] at the age of five or six.[5] During the holocaus, Spiegelman's parents sent Rysio to stay with an aunt with whom they believed he would be safe. In 1943, the aunt poisoned herself, along with Rysio and two other young family members in her care, so that the nazs could not take them to the extermination camps. After the war, the Spiegelmans, unable to accept that Rysio was dead, searched orphanages all over Europe in the hope of finding him. Spiegelman talked of having a sort of sibling rivalry with his "ghost brother"—he felt unable to compete with an "ideal" brother who "never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble".[6] Of 85 Spiegelman relatives alive at the beginning of World War II, only 13 are known to have survived the holocaus.[7]

Life and career

Early life

High School of Art and Design building

Spiegelman graduated from the High School of Art and Design in 1965.

Spiegelman was born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev[1] in Stockholm, Sweden, on February 15, 1948. He immigrated with his parents to the US in 1951.[8] Upon immigration his name was registered as Arthur Isadore, but he later had his given name changed to Art.[1] Initially the family settled in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and then relocated to Rego Park, Queens, New York City, in 1957.

He began cartooning in 1960[8] and imitated the style of his favorite comic books, such as Mad.[9] In the early 1960s, he contributed to early fanzines such as Smudge and Skip Williamson's Squire, and in 1962[10]—while at Russell Sage Junior High School, where he was an honors student—he produced the Mad-inspired fanzine Blasé. He was earning money from his drawing by the time he reached high school and sold artwork to the original Long Island Press and other outlets. His talent caught the eyes of United Features Syndicate, who offered him the chance to produce a syndicated comic strip. Dedicated to the idea of art as expression, he turned down this commercial opportunity.[9] He attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan beginning in 1963. He met Woody Gelman, the art director of Topps Chewing Gum Company, who encouraged Spiegelman to apply to Topps after graduating high school.[8] At age 15, Spiegelman received payment for his work from a Rego Park newspaper.[11]

After he graduated in 1965, Spiegelman's parents urged him to pursue the financial security of a career such as dentistry, but he chose instead to enroll at Harpur College to study art and philosophy. While there, he got a freelance art job at Topps, which provided him with an income for the next two decades.[12]

Binghamton State Mental Hospital

After Spiegelman's release from Binghamton State Mental Hospital, his mother committed suicide.

Spiegelman attended Harpur College from 1965 until 1968, where he worked as staff cartoonist for the college newspaper and edited a college humor magazine.[13] After a summer internship when he was 18, Topps hired him for Gelman's Product Development Department[14] as a creative consultant making trading cards and related products in 1966, such as the Wacky Packages series of parodic trading cards begun in 1967.[15]

Spiegelman began selling self-published underground comix on street corners in 1966. He had cartoons published in underground publications such as the East Village Other and traveled to San Francisco for a few months in 1967, where the underground comix scene was just beginning to burgeon.[15]

In late winter 1968, Spiegelman suffered a brief but intense nervous breakdown,[16] which cut short his university studies.[15] He has said that at the time he was taking LSD with great frequency.[16] He spent a month in Binghamton State Mental Hospital, and shortly after he exited it, his mother died by suicide following the death of her only surviving brother.[17]

Underground comix (1971–1977)

In 1971, after several visits, Spiegelman moved to San Francisco[15] and became a part of the countercultural underground comix movement that had been developing there. Some of the comix he produced during this period include The Compleat Mr. Infinity (1970), a ten-page booklet of explicit comic strips, and The Viper Vicar of Vice, Villainy and Vickedness (1972),[18] a transgressive work in the vein of fellow underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson.[19] Spiegelman's work also appeared in underground magazines such as Gothic Blimp Works, Bijou Funnies, Young Lust,[15] Real Pulp, and Bizarre Sex,[20] and were in a variety of styles and genres as Spiegelman sought his artistic voice.[19] He also did a number of cartoons for men's magazines such as Cavalier, The Dude, and Gent.[15]

In 1972, Justin Green asked Spiegelman to do a three-page strip for the first issue of Funny Aminals [sic].[21] He wanted to do one about raism, and at first considered a story[22] with African-Americans as mice and cats taking on the role of the .[23] Instead, he turned to the holocaus that his parents had survived. He titled the strip "Maus" and depicted the Jews as mice persecuted by die Katzen, which were nazs as cats. The narrator related the story to a mouse named "Mickey".[21] With this story Spiegelman felt he had found his voice.[11]

Seeing Green's revealingly autobiographical Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary while in-progress in 1971 inspired Spiegelman to produce "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", an expressionistic work that dealt with his mother's suicide; it appeared in 1973[24][25] in Short Order Comix #1,[26] which he edited.[15] Spiegelman's work thereafter went through a phase of increasing formal experimentation;[27] the Apex Treasury of Underground Comics in 1974 quotes him: "As an art form the comic strip is barely in its infancy. So am I. Maybe we'll grow up together."[28] The often-reprinted[29] "Ace Hole, Midget Detective" of 1974 was a Cubist-style nonlinear parody of hardboiled crime fiction full of non sequiturs.[30] "A Day at the Circuits" of 1975 is a recursive single-page strip about alcoholism and depression in which the reader follows the character through multiple never-ending pathways.[31] "Nervous Rex: The Malpractice Suite" of 1976 is made up of cut-out panels from the soap-opera comic strip Rex Morgan, M.D. refashioned in such a way as to defy coherence.[27]

In 1973, Spiegelman edited a pornographic and psychedelic book of quotations and dedicated it to his mother. Co-edited with Bob Schneider, it was called Whole Grains: A Book of Quotations.[32] In 1974–1975, he taught a studio cartooning class at the San Francisco Academy of Art.[18]

By the mid-1970s, the underground comix movement was encountering a slowdown. To give cartoonists a safe berth, Spiegelman co-edited the anthology Arcade with Bill Griffith, in 1975 and 1976. Arcade was printed by The Print Mint and lasted seven issues, five of which had covers by Robert Crumb. It stood out from similar publications by having an editorial plan, in which Spiegelman and Griffith attempt to show how comics connect to the broader realms of artistic and literary culture. Spiegelman's own work in Arcade tended to be short and concerned with formal experimentation.[33] Arcade also introduced art from ages past, as well as contemporary literary pieces by writers such as William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski.[34] In 1975, Spiegelman moved back to New York City,[35] which put most of the editorial work for Arcade on the shoulders of Griffith and his cartoonist wife, Diane Noomin. This, combined with distribution problems and retailer indifference, led to the magazine's 1976 demise. Spiegelman swore he would never edit another magazine.[36]

Françoise Mouly, an architectural student on a hiatus from her studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, arrived in New York in 1974. While looking for comics from which to practice reading English, she came across Arcade. Avant-garde filmmaker friend Ken Jacobs introduced Mouly and Spiegelman, when Spiegelman was visiting, but they did not immediately develop a mutual interest. Spiegelman moved back to New York later in the year. Occasionally the two ran across each other. After she read "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" Mouly felt the urge to contact him. An eight-hour phone call led to a deepening of their relationship. Spiegelman followed her to France when she had to return to fulfill obligations in her architecture course.[37]

Spiegelman introduced Mouly to the world of comics and helped her find work as a colorist for Marvel Comics.[38] After returning to the U.S. in 1977, Mouly ran into visa problems, which the couple solved by getting married.[39] The couple began to make yearly trips to Europe to explore the comics scene, and brought back European comics to show to their circle of friends.[40] Mouly assisted in putting together the lavish, oversized collection of Spiegelman's experimental strips Breakdowns in 1977.[41]

Raw and Maus (1978–1991)

Spiegelman visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1979 as research for Maus; his parents had been imprisoned there.

Breakdowns suffered poor distribution and sales, and 30% of the print run was unusable due to printing errors, an experience that motivated Mouly to gain control over the printing process.[41] She took courses in offset printing and bought a printing press for her loft,[42] on which she was to print parts of[43] a new magazine she insisted on launching with Spiegelman.[44] With Mouly as publisher, Spiegelman and Mouly co-edited Raw starting in July 1980.[45] The first issue was subtitled "The Graphix Magazine of Postponed Suicides".[44] While it included work from such established underground cartoonists as Crumb and Griffith,[36] Raw focused on publishing artists who were virtually unknown, avant-garde cartoonists such as Charles Burns, Lynda Barry, Chris Ware, Ben Katchor, and Gary Panter, and introduced English-speaking audiences to translations of foreign works by José Muñoz, Chéri Samba, Joost Swarte, Yoshiharu Tsuge,[27] Jacques Tardi, and others.[44]

With the intention of creating a book-length work based on his father's recollections of the holocaus[46] Spiegelman began to interview his father again in 1978[47] and made a research visit in 1979 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where his parents had been imprisoned by the nazs.[48] The book, Maus, appeared one chapter at a time as an insert in Raw beginning with the second issue in December 1980.[49] Spiegelman's father did not live to see its completion; he died on 18 August 1982.[35] Spiegelman learned in 1985 that Steven Spielberg was producing an animated film about Jewish mice who escape persecution in Eastern Europe by fleeing to the United States. Spiegelman was sure the film, An American Tail (1986), was inspired by Maus and became eager to have his unfinished book come out before the movie to avoid comparisons.[50] He struggled to find a publisher[7] until in 1986, after the publication in The New York Times of a rave review of the work-in-progress, Pantheon agreed to release a collection of the first six chapters. The volume was titled Maus: A Survivor's Tale and subtitled My Father Bleeds History.[51] The book found a large audience, in part because it was sold in bookstores rather than in direct-market comic shops, which by the 1980s had become the dominant outlet for comic books.[52]

Photo of an elderly man

Spiegelman and Will Eisner, (pictured in 1982), taught at the School of Visual Arts from 1978 to 1987.

Spiegelman began teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1978, and continued until 1987,[35] teaching alongside his heroes Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner.[53] "Commix: An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview", a Spiegelman essay, was published in Print.[54] Another Spiegelman essay, "High Art Lowdown", was published in Artforum in 1990, critiquing the High/Low exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.[54]

In the wake of the success of the Cabbage Patch Kids series of dolls, Spiegelman created the parodic trading card series Garbage Pail Kids for Topps in 1985. Similar to the Wacky Packages series, the gross-out factor of the cards was controversial with parent groups, and its popularity started a gross-out fad among children.[55] Spiegelman called Topps his "Medici" for the autonomy and financial freedom working for the company had given him. The relationship was nevertheless strained over issues of credit and ownership of the original artwork. In 1989 Topps auctioned off pieces of art Spiegelman had created rather than returning them to him, and Spiegelman broke the relation.[56]

In 1991, Raw Vol. 2, No. 3 was published; it was to be the last issue.[54] The closing chapter of Maus appeared not in Raw[49] but in the second volume of the graphic novel, which appeared later that year with the subtitle And Here My Troubles Began.[54] Maus attracted an unprecedented amount of critical attention for a work of comics, including an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art[57] and a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992.[58]

The New Yorker (1992–2001)

The New Yorker logo

Spiegelman and Mouly began working for The New Yorker in the early 1990s.

Hired by Tina Brown[59] as a contributing artist in 1992, Spiegelman worked for The New Yorker for ten years. His first cover appeared on the February 15, 1993, Valentine's Day issue and showed a black West Indian woman and a Hasidic man kissing. The cover caused turmoil at The New Yorker offices. Spiegelman intended it to reference the Crown Heights riot of 1991 in which racial tensions led to the murder of a Jewish yeshiva student.[60] Twenty-one New Yorker covers by Spiegelman were published,[61] and he also submitted some which were rejected for being too outrageous.[62]

Within The New Yorker's pages, Spiegelman contributed strips such as a collaboration, "In the Dumps", with children's illustrator Maurice Sendak[63][64] and an obituary to Charles M. Schulz, "Abstract Thought is a Warm Puppy".[65] Another of Spiegelman's essays, "Forms Stretched to their Limits", in an issue was about Jack Cole, the creator of Plastic Man. It formed the basis for a book about Cole, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to their Limits (2001).[65]

The same year, Voyager Company published The Complete Maus, a CD-ROM version of Maus with extensive supplementary material, and Spiegelman illustrated a 1923 poem by Joseph Moncure March called The Wild Party.[66] Spiegelman contributed the essay "Getting in Touch With My Inner Raist" in the September 1, 1997, issue of Mother Jones.[66]

Photo of a man seated and wearing glasses

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall begrudged Spiegelman's influence in New York cartooning circles.

Spiegelman's influence and connections in New York cartooning circles drew the ire of political cartoonist Ted Rall in 1999.[67] In "The King of Comix", an article in The Village Voice,[68] Rall accused Spiegelman of the power to "make or break" a cartoonist's career in New York, while denigrating Spiegelman as "a guy with one great book in him".[67] Cartoonist Danny Hellman responded by sending a forged email under Rall's name to 30 professionals; the prank escalated until Rall launched a defamation suit against Hellman for $1.5 million. Hellman published a "Legal Action Comics" benefit book to cover his legal costs, to which Spiegelman contributed a back-cover cartoon in which he relieves himself on a Rall-shaped urinal.[68]

In 1997, Spiegelman had his first children's book published, Open Me...I'm a Dog, with a narrator who tries to convince its readers that it is a dog via pop-ups and an attached leash.[69] From 2000 to 2003, Spiegelman and Mouly edited three issues of the children's comics anthology Little Lit, with contributions from Raw alumni and children's book authors and illustrators.[70]

Post-September 11 (2001–present)

Smoke flowing from World Trade Center buildings after terrorist attacks

The September 11 attacks provoked Spiegelman to create In the Shadow of No Towers.

Spiegelman lived close to the World Trade Center site, which was known as "Ground Zero" after the September 11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center.[71] Immediately following the attacks Spiegelman and Mouly rushed to their daughter Nadja's school, where Spiegelman's anxiety served only to increase his daughter's apprehensiveness over the situation.[61] Spiegelman and Mouly created a cover for the September 24 issue of The New Yorker[72][73] which at first glance appears to be totally black, but upon close examination it reveals the silhouettes of the World Trade Center towers in a slightly darker shade of black. Mouly positioned the silhouettes so that the North Tower's antenna breaks into the "w" of The New Yorker's logo. The towers were printed in black on a slightly darker black field employing standard four-color printing inks with an overprinted clear varnish. In some situations, the ghost images only became visible when the magazine was tilted toward a light source.[72] Spiegelman was critical of the Bush administration and the mass media over their handling of the September 11 attacks.[74]

Spiegelman did not renew his New Yorker contract after 2003.[75] He later quipped that he regretted leaving when he did, as he could have left in protest when the magazine ran a pro-invasion of Iraq piece later in the year.[76] Spiegelman said his parting from The New Yorker was part of his general disappointment with "the widespread conformism of the mass media in the Bush era".[77] He said he felt like he was in "internal exile"[74] following the September 11 attacks as the U.S. media had become "conservative and timid"[74] and did not welcome the provocative art that he felt the need to create.[74] Nevertheless, Spiegelman asserted he left not over political differences, as had been widely reported,[75] but because The New Yorker was not interested in doing serialized work,[75] which he wanted to do with his next project.[76]

Spiegelman responded to the September 11 attacks with In the Shadow of No Towers, commissioned by German newspaper Die Zeit, where it appeared throughout 2003. The Jewish Daily Forward was the only American periodical to serialize the feature.[74] The collected work appeared in September 2004 as an oversized[a] board book of two-page spreads which had to be turned on end to read.[78]

"Gargantua", a cartoon critical of King Louis Philippe I, led to the imprisonment of its author, Honoré Daumier.

In the June 2006 edition of Harper's Magazine Spiegelman had an article published on the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy; some interpretations of Islamic law prohibit the depiction of Muhammad. The Canadian chain of booksellers Indigo refused to sell the issue. Called "Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage", the article surveyed the sometimes dire effect political cartooning has for its creators, ranging from Honoré Daumier, who spent time in prison for his satirical work; to George Grosz, who faced exile. To Indigo the article seemed to promote the continuance of racial caricature. An internal memo advised Indigo staff to tell people: "the decision was made based on the fact that the content about to be published has been known to ignite demonstrations around the world."[79] In response to the cartoons, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for submissions of anti-Semitic cartoons. Spiegelman produced a cartoon of a line of prisoners being led to the gas chambers; one stops to look at the corpses around him and says, "Ha! Ha! Ha! What’s really hilarious is that none of this is actually happening!"[80]

To promote literacy in young children, Mouly encouraged publishers to publish comics for children.[81] Disappointed by publishers' lack of response, from 2008 she self-published a line of easy readers called Toon Books, by artists such as Spiegelman, Renée French, and Rutu Modan, and promotes the books to teachers and librarians for their educational value.[82] Spiegelman's Jack and the Box was one of the inaugural books in 2008.[83]

In 2008 Spiegelman reissued Breakdowns in an expanded edition including "Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!"[84] an autobiographical strip that had been serialized in the Virginia Quarterly Review from 2005.[85] A volume drawn from Spiegelman's sketchbooks, Be A Nose, appeared in 2009. In 2011, MetaMaus followed—a book-length analysis of Maus by Spiegelman and Hillary Chute with a DVD update of the earlier CD-ROM.[86]

Library of America commissioned Spiegelman to edit the two-volume Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts, which appeared in 2010, collecting all of Ward's wordless novels with an introduction and annotations by Spiegelman. The project led to a touring show in 2014 about wordless novels called Wordless! with live music by saxophonist Phillip Johnston.[87] Art Spiegelman's Co-Mix: A Retrospective débuted at Angoulême in 2012 and by the end of 2014 had traveled to Paris, Cologne, Vancouver, New York, and Toronto.[84] The book Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps, which complemented the show, appeared in 2013.[88]

In 2015, after six writers refused to sit on a panel at the PEN American Center in protest of the planned "freedom of expression courage award" for the satirical French periodical Charlie Hebdo following the shooting at its headquarters earlier in the year, Spiegelman agreed to be one of the replacement hosts,[89] along with other names in comics such as writer Neil Gaiman. Spiegelman retracted a cover he had submitted to a Gaiman-edited "saying the unsayable" issue of New Statesman when the management declined to print a strip of Spiegelman's. The strip, "Notes from a First Amendment Fundamentalist", depicts Muhammad, and Spiegelman believed the rejection was censorship, though the magazine asserted it never intended to run the cartoon.[90]

In 2021, Literary Hub announced that Spiegelman was co-creating a work Street Cop with author Robert Coover.[91]

Personal life

Spiegelman married Françoise Mouly in 1977 (pictured in 2015).

Spiegelman married Françoise Mouly on July 12, 1977,[92] in a City Hall ceremony.[39] They remarried later in the year after Mouly converted to Judaism to please Spiegelman's father.[39] Mouly and Spiegelman have two children together: a daughter Nadja Rachel, born in 1987,[92] and a son Dashiell Alan, born in 1991.[92]

Style

"All comic-strip drawings must function as diagrams, simplified picture-words that indicate more than they show."

— Art Spiegelman[93]

Spiegelman suffers from a lazy eye, and thus lacks depth perception. He says his art style is "really a result of [his] deficiencies". His is a style of labored simplicity, with dense visual motifs which often go unnoticed upon first viewing.[94] He sees comics as "very condensed thought structures", more akin to poetry than prose, which need careful, time-consuming planning that their seeming simplicity belies.[95] Spiegelman's work prominently displays his concern with form, and pushing the boundaries of what is and is not comics. Early in the underground comix era, Spiegelman proclaimed to Robert Crumb, "Time is an illusion that can be shattered in comics! Showing the same scene from different angles freezes it in time by turning the page into a diagram—an orthographic projection!"[96] His comics experiment with time, space, recursion, and representation. He uses the word "decode" to express the action of reading comics[97] and sees comics as functioning best when expressed as diagrams, icons, or symbols.[93]

Spiegelman has stated he does not see himself primarily as a visual artist, one who instinctively sketches or doodles. He has said he approaches his work as a writer as he lacks confidence in his graphic skills. He subjects his dialogue and visuals to constant revision—he reworked some dialogue balloons in Maus up to forty times.[98] A critic in The New Republic compared Spiegelman's dialogue writing to a young Philip Roth in his ability "to make the Jewish speech of several generations sound fresh and convincing".[98]

Spiegelman makes use of both old- and new-fashioned tools in his work. He prefers at times to work on paper on a drafting table, while at others he draws directly onto his computer using a digital pen and electronic drawing tablet, or mixes methods, employing scanners and printers.[95]

Influences

Two panels from wordless novel. On the left, a man carries a woman through the woods. On the right, a man looks at a nude in a studio.

Wordless woodcut novels such as those by Frans Masereel were an early influence.

Harvey Kurtzman has been Spiegelman's strongest influence as a cartoonist, editor, and promoter of new talent.[99] Chief among his other early cartooning influences include Will Eisner,[100] John Stanley's version of Little Lulu, Winsor McCay's Little Nemo, George Herriman's Krazy Kat,[99] and Bernard Krigstein's short strip "Master Race".[101]

In the 1960s Spiegelman read in comics fanzines about graphic artists such as Frans Masereel, who had made wordless novels in woodcut. The discussions in those fanzines about making the Great American Novel in comics later acted as inspiration for him.[46] Justin Green's comic book Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) motivated Spiegelman to open up and include autobiographical elements in his comics.[102]

Spiegelman acknowledges Franz Kafka as an early influence,[103] whom he says he has read since the age of 12,[104] and lists Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein among the writers whose work "stayed with" him.[105] He cites non-narrative avant-garde filmmakers from whom he has drawn heavily, including Ken Jacobs, Stan Brakhage, and Ernie Gehr, and other filmmakers such as Charlie Chaplin and the makers of The Twilight Zone.[106]

Beliefs

Spiegelman is a prominent advocate for the comics medium and comics literacy. He believes the medium echoes the way the human brain processes information. He has toured the U.S. with a lecture called "Comix 101", examining its history and cultural importance.[107] He sees comics' low status in the late 20th century as having come down from where it was in the 1930s and 1940s, when comics "tended to appeal to an older audience of GIs and other adults".[108] Following the advent of the censorious Comics Code Authority in the mid-1950s, Spiegelman sees comics' potential as having stagnated until the rise of underground comix in the late 1960s.[108] He taught courses in the history and aesthetics of comics at schools such as the School of Visual Arts in New York.[35] As co-editor of Raw, he helped propel the careers of younger cartoonists whom he mentored, such as Chris Ware,[76] and published the work of his School of Visual Arts students, such as Kaz, Drew Friedman, and Mark Newgarden. Some of the work published in Raw was originally turned in as class assignments.[53]

Spiegelman has described himself politically as "firmly on the left side of the secular-fundamentalist divide" and a "1st Amendment absolutist".[80] As a supporter of free speech, Spiegelman is opposed to hate speech laws. He wrote a critique in Harper's on the controversial Muhammad cartoons in the Jyllands-Posten in 2006; the issue was banned from Indigo–Chapters stores in Canada. Spiegelman criticized American media for refusing to reprint the cartoons they reported on at the time of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015.[109]

Spiegelman is a non-practicing Jew and considers himself "a-Zionist"—neither pro- nor anti-Zionist; he has called Israel "a sad, failed idea".[75] He told Peanuts creator Charles Schulz he was not religious, but identified with the "alienated diaspora culture of Kafka and Freud ... what Stalin pejoratively called rootless cosmopolitanism".[110]

Legacy

Maus looms large not only over Spiegelman's body of work, but over the comics medium itself. While Spiegelman was far from the first to do autobiography in comics, critics such as James Campbell considered Maus the work that popularized it.[11] The bestseller has been widely written about in the popular press and academia—the quantity of its critical literature far outstrips that of any other work of comics.[111] It has been examined from a great variety of academic viewpoints, though most often by those with little understanding of Maus' context in the history of comics. While Maus has been credited with lifting comics from popular culture into the world of high art in the public imagination, criticism has tended to ignore its deep roots in popular culture, roots that Spiegelman has intimate familiarity with and has devoted considerable time to promote.[112]

Spiegelman's belief that comics are best expressed in a diagrammatic or iconic manner has had a particular influence on formalists such as Chris Ware and his former student Scott McCloud.[93] In 2005, the September 11-themed New Yorker cover placed sixth on the top ten of magazine covers of the previous 40 years by the American Society of Magazine Editors.[72] Spiegelman has inspired numerous cartoonists to take up the graphic novel as a means of expression, including Marjane Satrapi.[99]

A joint ZDF–BBC documentary, Art Spiegelman's Maus, was televised in 1987.[113] Spiegelman, Mouly, and many of the Raw artists appeared in the documentary Comic Book Confidential in 1988.[54] Spiegelman's comics career was also covered in an Emmy-nominated PBS documentary, Serious Comics: Art Spiegelman, produced by Patricia Zur for WNYC-TV in 1994. Spiegelman played himself in the 2007 episode "Husbands and Knives" of the animated television series The Simpsons with fellow comics creators Daniel Clowes and Alan Moore.[114] A European documentary, Art Spiegelman, Traits de Mémoire, appeared in 2010 and later in English under the title The Art of Spiegelman,[113] directed by Clara Kuperberg and Joelle Oosterlinck and mainly featuring interviews with Spiegelman and those around him.[115]

Awards

Pulitzer Prize medal

Maus was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.

1982: Playboy Editorial Award, Best Comic Strip[116]

1982: Yellow Kid Award [de], Lucca, Italy, for Foreign Author [117][116]

1983: Print, Regional Design Award[116]

1984: Print, Regional Design Award[116]

1985: Print, Regional Design Award[116]

1986: Joel M. Cavior, Jewish Writing[118]

1987: Inkpot Award[116]

1988: Angoulême International Comics Festival, France, Prize for Best Comic Book, for Maus[54]

1988: Urhunden Prize, Sweden, Best Foreign Album, for Maus[119]

1990: Guggenheim Fellowship.[54]

1990: Max & Moritz Prize, Erlangen, Germany, Special Prize, for Maus[118]

1992: Pulitzer Prize Letters award, for Maus[120]

1992: Eisner Award, Best Graphic Album (reprint), for Maus[121]

1992: Harvey Award, Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work, for Maus[122]

1992: Los Angeles Times, Book Prize for Fiction for Maus II[123]

1993: Angoulême International Comics Festival, Prize for Best Comic Book, for Maus II[54]

1993: Sproing Award, Norway, Best Foreign Album, for Maus[118]

1993: Urhunden Prize, Best Foreign Album, for Maus II[119]

1995: Binghamton University (formerly Harpur College), honorary Doctorate of Letters.[66]

1999: Eisner Award, inducted into the Hall of Fame[65]

2005: French government, Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres[65]

2005: Time magazine, one of the "Top 100 Most Influential People"[124]

2011: Angoulême International Comics Festival, Grand Prix[125]

2011: National Jewish Book Award for MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus[126]

2015: American Academy of Arts and Letters membership[127]

2018: The Edward MacDowell Medal

Bibliography

Author

Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America's Forbidden Funnies, 1930s-1950s (Introductory Essay: Those Dirty Little Comics) (1977)

Breakdowns: From Maus to Now, an Anthology of Strips (1977)

Maus (1991)

The Wild Party (1994)

Open Me, I'm A Dog (1995)

Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits (2001)

In the Shadow of No Towers (2004)

Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! (2008)

Jack and the Box (2008)

Be a Nose (2009)

MetaMaus (2011)

Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps (2013)

Street Cop (with Robert Coover) (2021)

Editor

Short Order Comix (1972–74)

Whole Grains: A Book of Quotations (with Bob Schneider, 1973)

Arcade (with Bill Griffith, 1975–76)

Raw (with Françoise Mouly, 1980–91)

City of Glass (graphic novel adaptation by David Mazzucchelli of the Paul Auster novel, 1994)

The Narrative Corpse (1995)

Little Lit (with Françoise Mouly, 2000–2003)

The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics (with Françoise Mouly, 2009)

Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts (2010)

  

The Memory and Legacy of Trauma in Art Spiegelman's Maus

Author(s): Puneet Kohli

Source: Prandium - The Journal of Historical Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 2012).

Published by: The Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga

Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies 1

The Memory and Legacy of Trauma in Art Spiegelman’s Maus

Historical understanding is like a vision, or rather like an evocation of images”1

Amongst the plethora of holocaus literature, monuments, films, documentaries, and

exhibitions, Art Spiegelman’s graphical representation of the holocaus and its memory in Maus

I and II is one of the most poignant, striking, and creative. Groundbreaking in his approach,

Spiegelman reinterprets and expands both the comic form and traditional mediums of telling

history to express and relate the history of his survivor-father. Spiegelman also explores and

addresses the burden and legacy of traumatic memory on second-generation survivors.

Interweaving a variety of genres, characterizations, temporalities, and themes, Maus depicts the

process of, and Spiegelman’s relationship to, remembrance through a combination of images and

text.

This paper situates Spiegelman’s work within the framework of second-generation

holocaus literature and post-memory, and will discuss the debate regarding Spiegelman’s

representation of the memory process and the holocaus in the comic medium, along with his use

of animal characters instead of humans. Moreover the essay will critically analyze and enumerate

the various themes within Maus such as the relation between past and present and the recording

of memory. Ultimately this piece seeks to examine the efficacy and success of Spiegelman’s use

of the comic medium in memorializing the holocaus.

Divided into two texts (Maus I: My Father Bleeds History2

 and Maus II: And Here My

Troubles Began3

), Maus narrates the story of Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, two survivors of

1

 Johann Huizinga quoted in Joshua Brown, “Of Mice and Memory—Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art

Spiegelman,” The Oral History Review 16 no. 1 (1988) 104. 

2 Kohli – Memory and Legacy of Trauma

Auschwitz who resettle in Queens, New York. Art, their son, records his father’s memories in a

series of oral interviews. The story primarily chronicles Vladek’s life from 1930s Poland until

the end of the Second World War. In great detail, the memoir recounts his courtship and

marriage to Anja; his rise in business in the Polish town of Sosnoweic; his time in the Polish

Army and his subsequent capture and release by the nazs in 1939; his plans and strategies to

hide with Anja to avoid being sent to the camps; and his experience in Auschwitz. More broadly,

Vladek’s account traces the transition of the position of Jews in Poland through the

implementation and practice of the Third Reich’s anti-Semitic policies. Interchanging between

past and present and full of self-reflexivity, the narrative simultaneously records Vladek’s postholocaus life in America, Art’s childhood, and the present relationship between father and son.4

The Trauma of the Second-Generation

Maus is part of a larger body of second-generation holocaus literature. Children of

holocaus survivors grew up with the simultaneous presence and absence of holocaus memory

in their daily lives. As Anne Karpf acknowledges, “It seemed then as if I hadn’t lived the central

experience of my life—at its heart, at mine, was an absence.”5 Maus portrays how these children,

such as Art, possess a distinct sense of bearing an unlived trace of the holocaus past within the

present. As a result of being strongly marked by its legacy, many from the second generation

construct their identity in relation to the holocaus, exploring it through imaginative writing and

2

 Art Spiegelman, Maus I A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon Books,

1986). Hereafter Maus I. 3

 Art Spiegelman, Maus II A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon Books,

1991). Hereafter Maus II. 4

 Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Volume I and II) (London: Penguin Books, 2003). Hereafter

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. 5

 Anne Karpf as quoted in Erin McGlothlin, “Introduction,” Second-Generation holocaus Literature:

Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (New York: Camden House, 2006), 1. 

Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies 3

art, attempting to fill and restore the gaps created by this incomprehensible void. Marianne

Hirsch terms this effort as reflective of “post-memory,” the second generation’s response to the

trauma inherited from their parents.6

 Hirsch argues that “post-memory is a powerful form of

memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through

recollection, but through representation, projection, and creation.”7

James E. Young aptly notes that, since the majority of survivor-children were born after

the holocaus in the time of its memory, they only seek to represent their knowledge and

experience of these events that were learned through, and mediated by, its transmission.

Concerned less with certainty and historical truth, “post memorial writing employs narrative to

acknowledge the impossibility of fully grasping what happened, even as it ventures to construct a

story about the holocaus.”8

 The work of the second-generation thus illustrates a process of dual

and distanced memory: “instead of trying to remember events, they recall their relationship to the

memory of events…It becomes memory of a witness’s memory.”9

Maus, in its entirety, explores and records this act of dual memory, as Art recounts the

situations in which his father’s memories are conveyed. According to Erin McGothlin, postmemorial work performs a crucially double role by recording the personal and historical trauma

caused by the holocaus, and by facilitating the rehabilitation of the second generation to its

unlived past.10 At a certain point, Art lives through and recalls the effects his father’s memories

have on him: for example, in the opening scene of the first installment, Vladek, instead of

6

 Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: holocaus Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” The Yale

Journal of Criticism 14 no. 1 (2001): 8.

7 Ibid, 9.

8

 McGlothlin, 11.

9

 James E. Young, “The holocaus as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ and the Afterimages of

History,” Critical Inquiry 24 no. 3 (1998): 670.

10 McGlothlin, 11. 

4 Kohli – Memory and Legacy of Trauma

comforting his son after his friends leave him, cynically remarks that friends are fickle and

untrustworthy.11 Thus, Maus is part of second-generation literature that strives to both learn

about the influence of the first generation’s past on their present, and to work through and

comprehend their relationship and identity in the context of this traumatic and absent past.

The Perceived “Impropriety” of Comic Representation

 There has been great debate regarding ‘appropriate’ representations of memorializing the

holocaus. Although there is widespread consensus that the holocaus should be remembered by

as many as possible, mass cultural representations are generally regarded as improper and

incorrect.12 Elie Wiesel argues that “there is no such thing as a literature of the holocaus” and

T.W. Adorno, echoing Wiesel, strongly states that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is

barbaric.”13 Within this view then, it is nearly impossible to aesthetically capture or represent the

evil of the holocaus and the suffering of the Jews; anything that attempts to appropriate the

trauma is ‘barbaric.’ Since comics are commonly viewed as trivial,14 such an endeavor by

Spiegelman to represent the holocaus might appear to Adorno, Wiesel and others as grotesquely

comedic, mocking, and derogatory: to assimilate the holocaus into daily structures of thought

and to attempt to understand the unimaginable through mass cultural forms is akin to accepting

the Jewish genocide as one historical event among many.

However, Spiegelman’s creative and risky move to combine image and text to relate a

complex and fraught private oral history does not trivialize the holocaus; instead, it reflects a

11 Spiegelman, Maus I, Appendix I, 4-5.

12 Andreas Huyssen, “Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno,” New German Critique

81 (2000) 69.

13 Wiesel and Adorno as quoted in Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History (Mississippi: University of

Mississippi Press 1989), 97.

14 Ibid.

Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies 5

break from earlier understandings of literature and representation. Through his complex narrative

images, “Spiegelman transgresses the sacredness of Auschwitz by depicting…his survivor

father’s suffering.”15 In doing so, Spiegelman resists repeating what has already been seen, while

still existing within a textual re-presentation of familiar history. By discussing the holocaus,

Spiegelman also reinterprets and heightens the commonly low position of the comic medium into

a form that is highly expressive, multi-faced, critical, and psychologically layered.16

Within Maus itself, Spiegelman addresses the daunting enormity of his portrayal of

memory and the holocaus. In discussing the creation of Maus II, Spiegelman admits to feeling

so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams…and trying

to do it as a comic strip…there’s so much I’ll never be able to understand or visualize.”17 By

addressing the extensiveness of such a project, Spiegelman indicates the difficulty of his

undertaking to provide an ‘authentic’ representation. For Spiegelman to transform memories that

he has not experienced into words and images – and in a medium that is traditionally considered

as humorous – was a daunting task, given the subjective and distortive potential inherent within

memory, which further exacerbates an attempt at historical truth.

Against these barriers however, Spiegelman relentlessly tries to establish order and

accuracy.18 He consistently attempts to have Vladek provide specific physical and emotional

details about his experiences in order to reify the memory and make clear the chronology of the

complicated process of classification, segregation, deportation, and extermination by the nazs.

15 Michael Rothberg, “‘We Were Talking Jewish’: Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ as ‘holocaus’ Production,”

Contemporary Literature 35 no. 4 (1994), 665.

16 Young, 675.

17 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 176. Emphasis in original text.

18 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 84 and 228 

6 Kohli – Memory and Legacy of Trauma

Spiegelman conducted extensive research to corroborate and ‘materialize’ the words of his father

by consulting diagrams, photographs, and historical records.19 Spiegelman also went to great

effort to ensure the authenticity of Vladek’s transcribed voice by including the heavily accented

shtetl effect of Vladek’s narrative.20 In so doing, Spiegelman undertakes and achieves the role of

an oral historian in synthesizing historical knowledge with invaluable and insightful testimony.

Although historically relevant, the holocaus is secondary to Spiegelman’s concern of

both recording the process of memory and of understanding his relationship with his father.

Spiegelman does not aim to report about a verifiable event, but strives to create a version of what

was remembered.21 Consequently, history is relegated as influential background to Maus’s

examination of memory and relationships. Spiegelman clarifies that “Maus is not what happened

in the past, but rather what the son understands of the father’s story…[It is] an autobiographical

history of my relationship with my father, a survivor of the naz death camps.”22 Echoing this

sentiment, Young adds that, “‘What happened at Auschwitz’ is important historically; indeed it

is the substance of Vladek’s narrative; but the implication here is that the father’s story is

important because of its effects on the son, and not because of ‘what happened at Auschwitz.’”23

Young acknowledges that memory, while identifiable with history, concerns itself with

something other than historical accuracy. The memory of the holocaus, in order to

19 Brown, 98.

20 Rothberg, 671.

21 Lisa A. Costello, “History and Memory in a Dialogic of ‘Performative Memorialization’ in Art

Spiegelman’s ‘Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,’“ The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 39

no, 2 (2006) 25-26.

22 Young, 670.

23Ibid., 699. 

Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies 7

communicate the reality of an unimaginable occurrence, must employ figures and metaphors that

transcend the confining boundaries of fact.24

Although Maus does not present itself to be a record of history, it does register and

corroborate historical fact such as the liquidation of Jewish businesses before the war, forced

ghettoization, the aid of Jewish leaders in naz deportations,25 the conditions—physical and

political--within Auschwitz, and the possibilities of resistance.26 Ultimately however, Maus

avoids trivializing the holocaus and is a successful work of history because it presents the story

in its entirety. Spiegelman does not hide his betrayal of excluding the story of Vladek’s earlier

relationship with Lucia;27 he does not present his father as a heroic survivor; and he does not

attempt to center Maus on a morally uplifting ideal of hope and preservation or happy

reconciliation. The bluntness and failure to provide the reader with a catharsis avoids the

construction of “knowing” and “understanding” the holocaus.

Mice, Cats, Pigs, and Dogs: The Use of Animal Characters

Spiegelman’s conscious employment of animal characters in Maus has been controversial

and criticized by many who argue that it casts the significance of the holocaus as commonplace

and comedic. Spiegelman justifies his use of the animal imagery as a necessary method to retain

authenticity and over-sympathetic sentiment:

First of all, I’ve never been through anything like that…and it would be

counterfeit to try to pretend that the drawings are representations of something

that’s actually happening. I don’t know what a German looked like who was in a

specific small town doing a specific thing…I’m bound to do something

24 Gillian Banner, holocaus Literature: Schulz, Levi, Spiegelman and the Memory of the Offence

(London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000), 18.

25 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 89.

26 Janet Thormann, “The Representation of the Shoah in Maus: History as Psychology,” Res Publica 8

(2002), 131.

27 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 25. 

8 Kohli – Memory and Legacy of Trauma

inauthentic. Also I’m afraid that if I did it with people, it would be very corny. It

would out as some kind of odd plea for sympathy…and that wasn’t my point.28

By depicting the characters as animals, Spiegelman de-familiarizes and eludes the

already told’ quality of the holocaus story. In drawing the Jews as mice, the nazs as cats, the

Poles as pigs, and the Americans as dogs, Spiegelman also avoids the over-determination of

meaning that would occur from human imagery.29 The use of animal imagery also enables

Spiegelman “to show the events and memory of the holocaus without showing them”30 in order

to maintain the focus on the relationship between characters and memory.

 Other critics argue that the use of animals distracts and distances the reader from the

main story and its characters. However the imagery becomes secondary to the interactions of the

narrative. Due to his simple drawings of the animals and their strongly human characterizations,

one begins to identify the characters as human rather than animal. One only becomes consciously

aware of the anthropomorphic figures when Spiegelman purposefully draws the animal-face as a

mask, and when he suddenly includes the human-drawn characters of “Prisoner on the Hell

Planet.”31 These disruptions not only force the reader out of complacency, but also compel the

reader to decipher and question the constructed notion that these ‘persons’ are regarded as

different species. In this way, Spiegelman gestures to the arbitrariness and divisiveness of such

racial conceptions. Spiegelman argues that “to use these ciphers, the cats and mice, is actually a

way to allow you past the cipher at the people who are experiencing it. So it’s really a much

more direct way of dealing with the material.”32 The characters’ lack of acknowledgment of their

28 Quoted in Huyssen, 75.

29 Witek, 103.

30 Quoted in Young, 687.

31 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 102-105.

32 Huyssen, 75. 

Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies 9

animal’ quality when juxtaposed with actual animals suggests that the imagery, though

important, forms the background to the rest of the narrative: instead of defining the narrative, the

images facilitate it.33 Moreover, the ignorance of the characters also implies that one’s identity is

subjectively figured by perspective, both by the individual and by the recognition of this identity

by others. For example, when Vladek wears a pig mask (projecting a particular identity), the

other Polish pigs recognize him as such.34

 Spiegelman’s metaphor of cats and mice is powerful and contentious. The initial premise

of this polarized characterization effectively presents the power relations between the nazs and

the Jews, and suggests the predatory nature of the naz oppression. Yet some argue that this

metaphor naturalizes the acting out of ‘natural’ roles (i.e. it is commonly understood that it is

natural for the bigger cats to attack the weaker mice). 35 This metaphor however does not extend

to grant moral absolution to either side, as evidenced in the ambiguous and fluid roles of ‘victim’

and ‘perpetrator’ (further discussion of this will follow). The Jews and nazs are only mice and

cats in relation to each other in a particular context; the metaphor is not a literal characterization,

but rather a conception of unequal human relations. The metaphor may also point to the

dehumanization of victims that can lead to genocide; conversely, it may comment on the naz

animalistic and inhumane behaviour.36

Throughout Maus, the animal characters serve to comment and undermine the idea of

racial theory. Placed at the beginning of the first volume, Hitler’s statement that “the Jews are

33 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 149.

34 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 151.

35 Witek, 112.

36 Staub, 37. 

10 Kohli – Memory and Legacy of Trauma

undoubtedly a race, but they are not human”37 is realized and contradicted within Maus. As

mentioned earlier, though Spiegelman avoids depicting any character as human, he imbues the

characters with human emotions and thought-processes so that the reader identifies and perceives

them as the embodiment and performance of humanness. His animal rendering of these

characters reveals the irrationality and artifice of Hitler’s claims. In Maus II, in a moment of selfreflexivity, Spiegelman directly addresses the this arbitrariness of depicting the characters as

animals. Art’s difficulty in deciding how he should draw his wife, a Frenchwoman and former

Gentile, illustrates the constructed and arbitrary interpretation of, and relation between, identity,

nationality, and ethnicity.38 The creativity of the animal imagery and metaphor thus does not

trivialize the holocaus, but points to the deeper meanings and reverberations within Maus.

Memory in Maus

Through the balance of image and text, Spiegelman’s Maus conveys a variety of

intersecting and influential meanings and perceptions of the holocaus. More than simply telling

a story or creating a biographical account, Maus depicts the process of transmitting and

recording memory. Throughout the text, Spiegelman aims to portray the permeability and

pliancy of memory by including the digressions and nuances of daily life that intrude upon and

influence it. Art, focused more on his father’s telling of the story, pays little attention to these

diversions (although the fact that they are recorded indicate their importance and role as

constituting part of the procedure of remembering). At some points Art becomes distraught with

these deviations, screaming in one scene, “ENOUGH…TELL ME ABOUT AUSCHWITZ!”39

37 Spiegelman, Maus I, 10.

38 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 171.

39 Spiegelman, Maus II, 47. 

Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies 11

These shifts in thought and discussion capture the sense of an interview shaped by a father and

son’s tense relationship.

By including the practice of recording Vladek’s account, Maus also demonstrates how

memory is not based on definitive fact, but rather part of a constitutive process. Remembering is

thus not merely a recall of occurrences, but instead involves the construction of the past.40 The

representation addresses the dual and co-productive nature of knowledge and narrative:

What is generated in the interaction between father and son…is not a revelation of

a story already existing, waiting to be told, but a new story unique to their

experience together. This medium allows the artist to show not only the creation

of his father’s story but the necessary grounds for its creation, the ways his

father’s story hinges on his relationship to the listener41

Hence image or word alone cannot convey the dual process of memory-generation:

Spiegelman achieves a mixture of picture and text that reflects and makes visible the mutually

constructive relationship between teller and listener in the recounting and subsequent

understanding and depiction of the narrative.

 Throughout Maus, Art grapples with determining the proper methods to illustrate and

capture historical memories that are horrible, necessary, and contentious. Art’s continuous search

for his deceased mother’s diaries of the holocaus, along with the devastating realization that

they have been destroyed is pivotal. The metaphor points to the difficulty present in recovering

all narratives of both the holocaus and other traumatic events.42 The eighth chapter of the series,

captioned as “Time Flies,” further elaborates on the sense that, because of the limited amount of

40 Brown, 95.

41 Young, 676.

42 Michael Staub, “The Shoah Goes on and on: Remembrance and Representation in Art Spiegelman’s

Maus,” MELUS 20 no. 3 (1995), 35. 

12 Kohli – Memory and Legacy of Trauma

time,43 there is the inherent danger that memories will pass to the realm of the forgotten if they

remain silent. Interpretation of and insight into history then are not merely constituted in

objective’ facts and documents, but in the recorded memories, experiences, and perceptions of

contemporary individuals.

 As part of Maus’s portrayal of remembrance, Spiegelman strives to illustrate, figuratively

and literally, the ways in which the present is continuously constituted, shaped, and imbued with

the past. According to Dominic LaCapra, “the past not only interacts with, but erupts into, the

present, and at times the present seems to be only a function of, or a diaphanous screen for, the

past.”44 The notion and images of “past” and “present” are not clearly marked in Maus, but

instead intimately interwoven on many different levels. In the second volume, as Vladek

recounts the procedure of Selektionen, he physically demonstrates and re-enacts the past in the

present by turning to “FACE LEFT” just as he was ordered to by the nazs.45 Spiegelman

pictorially reproduces this moment with an abrupt transition in the last panel to Vladek

performing the same action in the past.46 At the beginning of Maus II, past and present are

spatially combined.47 A territorial map of New York intrudes upon a pictorial layout of the

Auschwitz camp. In the foreground, situated between both images, is Vladek, depicted simply in

his concentration camp stripes. The entire representation indicates the extent to which Vladek’s

character is formed by both his past and present. The prison-like stripes also indicate how

Vladek, even after the holocaus, is trapped and shaped by his memory of it. The bearing of the

43 Ibid, 42.

44 Dominic LaCapra, “Twas the Night Before Christmas: Art Spiegelman’s Maus” in History and Memory

After Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998) 155.

45 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 218.

46 McGothlin, 66-67.

47 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 166. 

Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies 13

past upon the present is more subtly indicated by the visual foregrounding of symbols of the past.

For example, Vladek is situated in front of Art when he is riding the stationary bicycle.48 In one

panel of this scene, Vladek’s Auschwitz tattoo is clearly visible and almost obstructs the reader’s

view of Art,49 indicating the extent to which the father’s past ‘bleeds’ into the son’s present.50

Similarly, the present frames the need to understand the past. Thematically, the memoir

of Vladek begins not with his own story, but with the story of Art’s experience as an inheritor

and secondary victim of, and witness to, traumatic memory.51 This reiterates that Maus is not

about the holocaus specifically, but about the relationship of memory to the holocaus and its

relationship to the present. The collapse of temporal space in Maus demonstrates and reinforces a

dual perception: the first is that memory and history are not exclusively divorced and objective

entities—both inform and consolidate the other; the second is that both memory and history have

no definable beginning, middle, or end—one’s story is continuous and fluid. This conveyance of

memory and history is heightened through the combined use of image and text; it would not be

as apparent or powerful if represented in any other form. Maus then, embodies William

Faulkner’s statement that “the past is not dead and buried; in fact, it is not even past:”52 the past

is part of the present and the present is part of the understanding of the past. Consequently,

Spiegelman demonstrates that both his own identity and that of his father are compounded by the

memories they share and hold.

The Complication of the ‘Survivor’

48 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 14.

49 Spiegelman, Maus I, 12.

50 Costello, 31.

51 Young, 678.

52 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951), 45. 

14 Kohli – Memory and Legacy of Trauma

Spiegelman’s project seeks to dispel and problematize the image of the archetypal

holocaus survivor to suggest something more complex and multi-layered. Vladek’s survival is

never sentimentalized nor is the tension between father and son muted. The troubled filial bond

and generational disconnect climaxes when Art harshly accuses his father of murder for

destroying Anja’s diaries.53 Maus not only implies that the image of the forever hopeful,

perseverant, and optimistic “survivor” is misguided, but also suggests that such a past can have

psychologically negative effects on the identity of the parent and child. Epitomized in the most

jarringly emotional and personal episode of Maus, entitled “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case

History, Art articulates, through image and word, the burden he carries of this distant, unlived,

and influential, past.54 His donning of concentration camp clothing throughout the piece and his

depiction behind prison bars symbolically connects and emphasizes the trauma and legacy of the

holocaus.55

The memory of the holocaus touches upon and victimizes multiple generations so that

the story of Maus is not about one survivor or one level of survival, but instead about the varied

layers and contradictory exemplifications of ‘survivor’ and ‘survival.’ Spiegelman demonstrates

the relativity and ambiguity of the role of perpetrator and victim. While Vladek is a victim at the

hands of the nazs and a survivor of the holocaus, in the eyes of young Art, the father becomes

a perpetrator of violence and miserliness. Similarly, Art imagines himself as victim of his

father’s memory and experience. In one scene, Art’s psychiatrist observes that Art is “the REAL

53 Spiegelman, Maus I, 161.

54 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 102-105.

55 Staub, 40. 

Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies 15

survivor”56 of the guilt his father takes out on him (emphasis in original). The roles begin to blur

and shift however as Art, in his search to learn the story of his parents becomes harsh, impatient,

and interrogative towards his father. As suggested by the title of the first volume, Vladek, for a

second time, transforms into the victim that “bleeds” history, as his son pries open wounds that

had long been sewn. Ultimately Maus illustrates how these roles are fluid, relative, and

contentious. Spiegelman’s portrayal of his parents and life does not in any way decrease or deny

the importance of the survivor; instead Spiegelman adds to and provides insight into the lives

and relationships of survivors.

The Immortalization of Memory in Comic: Success or Failure?

The use of the comic medium is highly advantageous and effective in transmitting the

memorial narrative of the holocaus. Defining his style as “commix”—the commixture of words

and pictures to tell a story—Spiegelman explains that “the strength of commix lies in [its] ability

to approximate a ‘mental language’ that is closer to human thought than either word or picture

alone.”57 This combination of picture and text enables a multiply layered story with varied levels

of meaning communicated through the simultaneous movement between word, image, and

observation. Spiegelman describes how the story thus “operates somewhere between the words

and the idea that’s in the picture and in the movement between pictures, which is the essence of

what happens in a comic.”58

Moreover such a process keeps the reader mentally and physically engaged in connecting

and understanding the relationship between the text and the images. Spiegelman sought to reduce

56 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 204.

57 Young, 672.

58 Brown, 104. 

16 Kohli – Memory and Legacy of Trauma

the gap between words and images by creating simpler graphics, explaining, “I didn’t want

people to get too interested in the drawings. I wanted them to be there, but the story operates

somewhere else…[s]o, by not focusing you too hard on these people you’re forced back into

your role as reader rather than looker.”59 The images aid in the ‘realization’ of Vladek’s words,

while the text helps to facilitate and contextualize the illustration. While awkward to portray in

prose, the medium permits the diagrammatic representation of territorial maps, hiding places,

shore-repairing techniques, and the layouts of the bunker and crematorium. 60Although

Spiegelman presents the particular images created in his mind by Vladek’s testimony, he does so

in a way that does not subsume the reader’s imagination but stimulates it; the simple drawings

engage the reader in the ‘filling-out’ of the image.61

 By employing the comic medium to represent the past, Spiegelman reinvents the

traditional parameters of the form. The comic is commonly associated with showing the present

or future, along with depicting the fantastic and the incredible.62 Spiegelman appropriates the

form so successfully in illustrating real occurrences of the holocaus that he expands and

restructures the traditional comic framework. Since the holocaus is considered to be an

impossible reality,’ it is fitting that a medium regarded as the epitome of the fantastic be used to

depict what is unimaginable. Moreover, “by situating a non-fictional story in a highly mediated,

unreal, ‘comic’ space, Spiegelman captures the hyper-intensity of Auschwitz.”63 The comic

59 Ibid. 60 Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 112, 220, 230 .

61 Brown, 104.

62 Banner, 132.

63 Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: the Demands of holocaus Representation (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 206. 

Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies 17

medium thus demands the reader to confront the suffering and obscenity of the holocaus as

visual representation.64

 The comic medium also enables a deeper, more comprehensive representation of

Vladek’s memories and the process of remembering. The mixture of image and text allows

Spiegelman to portray a multi-faceted narrative of the events of the story, its unfolding,65 and the

representation of biography and autobiography in one text.66 The comic frame also pictorially

links the past and present so that they are understood together as one and the same process.

Spiegelman notes that comics “are about time being made manifest spatially, in that you’ve got

all these different chunks of time—each box being a different moment in time—and you see

them all at once. As a result, you’re always…being made aware of different times inhabiting the

same space.”67 The collapsed temporal imagery emphasizes the way in which memory has a

layering effect upon chronology so that pasts and presents appear alongside each other. The

comic images also serve to reduce the perceived distance between the reader and the events. The

depicted memories look recent and thereby become contemporary images to the reader.68 This

further lessens the conception of the holocaus as ‘past’ or ‘history’ and reinforces the idea of

the interwoven relationship between the past and present. At the same time, the panel format of

the comic is able to easily differentiate and divide, and subsequently compare, the depictions of

two separate temporal levels in a more distinct way than is possible with narrative. Ultimately

64 Rothberg, “We are talking Jewish,” 666.

65 Young, 673.

66 Hillary Chute, “The Shadow of a Past Time: History and Graphic Representation in Maus,” Twentieth

Century Literature 52 no. 2 (2006), 209.

67 Ibid., 201-202.

68 Banner, 132, 134. 

18 Kohli – Memory and Legacy of Trauma

the comic medium is highly successful and effective in illustrating Spiegelman’s ideas about

memory and history.

Beyond Representing a ‘Received History’

Although Young argues that Maus embodies a model of “received history,” it is better

understood as a reflection of Saul Friedlander’s proposal for a particular historical narrative that

maintains the memory of the holocaus. Young defines ‘received history’ as “a narrative hybrid

that interweaves both events of the holocaus and the ways they are passed down to us.”69 While

Maus does fulfill these criteria, Young hastily relegates it into this category and dismisses it as

an actual answer to Friedlander’s call. Friedlander argues for a historiography in which the

narrative is disrupted by the historian’s own voice to comment, introduce alternative

perspectives, be critical of partial conclusions, and avoid the necessity of closure and catharsis in

order to remind readers that history is remembered in context, by a particular person in a specific

time and place.70

Maus successfully achieves all these objectives. Firstly, both volumes include process of

self-reflexivity, in which Art the character comments and debates on such matters as how to

record Vladek’s testimony or what animal to draw his French, formerly-Gentile wife. This

disruption is also evident in the abrupt inclusion of the “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” segment;

not only does it engage the reader because of its arbitrary and unexplained placement in the text,

but it also serves to disengage the reader from complacency and familiarity while reading Maus.

Secondly, by providing an alternative and more complexly ambiguous understanding of the

survivor,’ the process of historical memory, and the role of the holocaus, Spiegelman leaves

69 Young, 669.

70Friedlander,as summarized by Young, 667-668. 

Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies 19

interpretation open to the reader to decipher their own meaning (if any). In so doing, Spiegelman

challenges and is critical of partial conclusions that arise from representing the holocaus

through a particular paradigm. Fourthly, Spiegelman’s blunt and honest approach to record the

entirety of the relationship between his father, himself, and both their memories of the holocaus

withstands the employment or need for a morally uplifting lesson or meaning. Finally, though

Maus reflects the process of working-through memory to understand events, Spiegelman makes

clear that a certain level of comprehension of such events is impossible. Consequently, Maus

fulfills Friedlander’s request for a narrative form that integrates ‘common memory’ and ‘deep

memory:’71 one that makes events coherent and yet indicates the ultimate incoherence of the

victim’s experience.72

Elie Wiesel’s famously posed question, “How does one remember?”73 suggests that, in

order for the holocaus to be secured in history, it must first and foremost be preserved in

memory. Maus answers this question through its critically insightful immortalization of memory

and the holocaus. Through the commixture of images and words, Spiegelman reinterprets and

expands traditional perceptions regarding comics and representations of the holocaus.

Spiegelman skillfully avoids trivializing the holocaus by interweaving a variety of narrative

voices, imagistic styles, and temporalities. Maus illustrates the intimate, influential, and mutually

constitutive relationship between past and present. In a piece such as this, memory cannot be

judged with the same criteria of accuracy, coherency, and analysis which historiography imposes

71 For Friedlander, ‘common memory’ is that which restores or establishes coherence or closure, while

deep memory’ refers to that which remains inarticulate, existing as unresolved trauma beyond meaning

72 Young, 668.

73 Quoted in Alison Landsberg, “America, the holocaus, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a

Radical Politics of Empathy,” New German Critique 71 (1997), 64. 

20 Kohli – Memory and Legacy of Trauma

in its attempt at objectivity, because in the course of remembering, historical facts may be

altered, lost, or misinterpreted. However this does not preclude the ability of memory to add to,

describe, or provide realism and humanism to the ‘objective’ facts of the tragedy. Moreover,

memory offers alternative perspectives and insight to the ‘official’ or general outlook on a

historical event. Ultimately, Maus is not a fictional comic strip, nor is it an illustrated novel:

however unusual the form, it is an important historical work that offers historians a unique

approach to narrative construction and interpretation.

 

Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies 21

Bibliography

Banner, Gillian. holocaus Literature: Schulz, Levi, Spiegelman and the Memory of the Offence.

London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000.

Brown, Joshua. “Of Mice and Memory—Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman.” The Oral

History Review 16 no.1 (1988): 91-109.

Chute, Hillary. “The Shadow of a Past Time: History and Graphic Representation in Maus.”

Twentieth Century Literature 52 no. 2 (2006): 199-230.

Costello, Lisa A. “History and Memory in a Dialogic of ‘Performative Memorialization’ in Art

Spiegelman’s ‘Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,’“ The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language

Association 39 no. 2 (2006), 22-42.

Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random House, 1951.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: holocaus Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.”

The Yale Journal of Criticism 14 no. 1 (2001) 5-37.

Huyssen, Andreas. “Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno.” New German

Critique 81 (2000), 65-82.

LaCapra, Dominic. “Twas the Night Before Christmas: Art Spiegelman’s Maus” in History and

Memory After Auschwitz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Landsberg, Alison. “America, the holocaus, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a

Radical Politics of Empathy.” New German Critique 71 (1997), 63-86.

McGlothlin, Erin Heather. Second-generation holocaus Literature. New York: Camden House,

2006.

Rothberg, Michael. “‘We Were Talking Jewish’: Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ as ‘holocaus’

Production.” Contemporary Literature 35 no. 4 (1994), 661-687. 

22 Kohli – Memory and Legacy of Trauma

Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: the Demands of holocaus Representation. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus I A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon

Books, 1986.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus II A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon

Books, 1991.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Volume I and II). London: Penguin Books, 2003.

Staub, Michael. The Shoah Goes on and on: Remembrance and Representation in Art

Spiegelman’s Maus,” MELUS 20 no. 3 (1995), 33-46.

Thormann, Janet. “The Representation of the Shoah in Maus: History as Psychology.” Res

Publica 8 (2002),123-139.

Young, James E. “The holocaus as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ and the

Afterimages of History.” Critical Inquiry 24 no. 3 (1998), 666-699.

Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and

Harvey Pekar. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. 

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