Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and author
Art Spiegelman is best noted for his two-volume graphic novel series
"Maus," whilch Dale Luciano described in the Comics Journal as
"among the remarkable achievements in comics." An epic parable of the
Holocaust that substitutes mice and cats for human Jews and Nazis, the work
stands in contrast to much of Spiegelman's works, which have ranged from
designing chewinggum cards to editing comic-book anthologies. Prior to creating
"Maus" he was most well known in underground comics circles as
publisher of the comix anthology Raw, which he produced with his wife,
Françoise Mouly, beginning in the early 1980s. However, he has been a
significant presence in graphic art since his teen years, when he wrote,
printed, and distributed his own comics magazine.
Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to
Vladek and Anja, two survivors of the Holocaust. As a young child, the
Spiegelman family moved to the United States, where Art grew up in Rego Park,
New York. "I think . . . that I learned to read from looking at
comics," Spiegelman told Joey Cavalieri in Comics Journal, citing early
exposure to the likes of Mad magazine and various superhero books. With his
talent for art in evidence, Spiegelman entered New York City's High School of
Art and Design where, as part of a cartoon course assignment, he wrote and
illustrated a comic strip that attracted the interest of a New York publishing
syndicate. The experience made Spiegelman aware that the parameters for
conventional comics were too narrowly defined for his ideas. He went on to study art and philosophy at
Harpur College before becoming part of the San Francisco-based underground
comics movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1980, Spiegelman co-founded
RAW, the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine, with his wife, Françoise Mouly.
For eleven years, RAW lavishly presented groundbreaking work by contemporary
cartoonists and serialized Spiegelman's Maus in chapter-length installments.
Creating a strip for a compilation titled "Funny Aminals", Spiegelman
was inspired while watching old cartoons featuring cats and mice. As he told
Cavalieri, "this cat and mouse thing was just a metaphor for some kind of
oppression." Drawing from his family background, he decided to explore his
mother and father's experience in, and survival of, a Nazi concentration camp.
"Maus" starts with Spiegelman,
representing himself as a anthropomorphized mouse, going to his father, Vladek,
for information about the Holocaust. As Vladek's tale begins, he and his wife,
Anja, are living in Poland with their young child, Richieu, at the outset of
World War II. The Nazis, as cats, have overrun much of Eastern Europe, and
their oppression is felt by everyone, especially the Jews/mice. The story
recalls Vladek's service in the Polish army and subsequent incarceration in a
German war prison. As he returns to Anja and his home, the Nazi "Final
Solution"—to exterminate the entire Jewish race—is well under way. There
is much talk of Jews being rounded up and shipped off to the camps, where they
are either put to strenuous work or put to death. Vladek and Anja's attempt to
flee is thwarted and they are sent to Auschwitz, Poland, site of one of the
most notorious camps. As the first book of "Maus" concludes, Richieu
has been taken from his parents by the Nazis, never to be seen again, and
Vladek and Anja are separated and put in crowded train cars for shipment to
Auschwitz.
As the second volume, And Here My Troubles
Began, opens, Spiegelman and and his wife are visiting Vladek at his summer
home in the Catskills. During the visit son and father resume their discussion.
Vladek recounts how he and Anja were put in separate camps, he at Auschwitz and
she at neighboring Birkenau. The horrors and inhumanity of concentration-camp
life are related in graphic detail. Vladek recalls the discomfort of cramming
three or four men into a bunk that is only a few feet wide and the ignominy of
scrounging for any scrap of food to sate his unending hunger. His existence at
Auschwitz is marked by agonizing physical labor, severe abuse from the Nazis,
and the ever present fear that he—or Anja—may be among the next sent to the gas
chambers. Despite these overwhelming incentives to abandon hope, Vladek is
bolstered by his clandestine meetings with Anja and the discovery of supportive
allies among his fellow prisoners. He manages to hold on until the war ends,
then joins several other prisoners in making his way to safety. He eventually
finds Anja and their reunion marks a happy point in Vladek's tale. After a
fruitless search for Richieu, they move to Sweden where Spiegelman is born, and
then travel to America. The horrors of the war scar Anja permanently however,
and in 1968 she commits suicide. The book concludes with Art visiting Vladek
just before his death in 1982. The two volumes of Maus were published by
Pantheon in 1986 and 1991, respectively, and were published together as The
Complete Maus in 1996.
Art Spiegelman's work has frequently appeared
in The New Yorker, where he was a staff artist, writer and cover artist from
1993-2003. In 2004 Spiegelman completed a two-year cycle of broadsheet-sized
color comics pages, In the Shadow of No Towers, first published in a number of
European newspapers and magazines as well as in The Forward. A book version of
these highly political works, published by Pantheon in the United States,
appeared on many national bestseller lists and was selected by The New York
Times Book Review as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2004.
by Małgorzata Olsza
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