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It can be said that few have done more to push the comics medium forward as an art form, and into legitimacy, than Art Spiegelman. Most well-known for his masterpiece Maus, Spiegelman is a staunch believer in experimentation in art, and uses his wild styles to create emotion in works like Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers. But his work wasn’t limited to comics, and unlike most other authors on this blog, he wasn’t primarily a writer, but an artist. So today, we’ll examine how an experimental artist created one of the most popular and important comic books.
History
Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman, known professionally as Art, was born February 15, 1948. He initially lived in in Stockholm, Sweden with his parents, but they immigrated to Queens, New York in 1951 to be closer to his mother’s only remaining relative. His parents were Polish Jews, and survived World War 2 and the Holocaust. Their experiences under Nazi rule and in the concentration camps would hang over Spiegelman’s work. At once something he knew about his parents, and something rarely given significant attention, their history as survivors both haunted him, and wasn’t relevant to him until later in his life.
In direct contrast to his father, who had worked many sale, trade, and physical labor jobs, and his parent’s wishes that he go into a career with financial stabilities like dentistry, Art was instead inspired by comic books to become a professional artist. By the time he was 15, he’d already turned down the opportunity to write a syndicated comic strip because of his dedication to art as expression. He attended the State University of New York at Binghamton from 1965 to 1968 and worked freelance for Topps Chewing Gum Company drawing their trading cards. However, he left college in 1968 after his mother suicide. He continued to work for Topps for 2 decades.
Spigelman spent much of the 1970s breaking into the underground comics industry, reading and writing advent-garde works. Notably, in 1972, he published two strips that would later define some of his most well-known work. The first was Maus. Originally a 3-panel story for Justin Green’s Funny Animals anthology, this short strip would serve as the inspiration for Spiegelman’s later biographic comic by the same name. The second was Prisoner on the Hell Planet, which attempted to make sense of his mother’s suicide, and used a style evocative of German Expressionist woodcuts. Between these two short strips, Spiegelman had unknowingly drafted his future as a comic artist. To tell serious stories that explored the complex emotions surrounding disasters, and using bold art styles that challenged the standards of the comic medium.
Later in the 70s he met Francoise Mouly, an architectural student on hiatus. The two were introduced by a mutual friend, but it wasn’t until Mouly later read Prisoner on the Hell Planet and called him up for an 8-hour conversation that they began to grow closer. They became good friends and decided to marry in 1977 when her visa ran into problems, the marriage allowed her to stay in America. Mouly became a great supporter of Spiegelman. She helped collect his work into a single book called Breakdowns the same year they married, and the next year convinced him to create Raw, a magazine for unknown artists. It was in Raw that Spiegelman began publishing chapters of Maus, the story that would become his masterpiece.
In 1985, while managing Raw, and working on Maus, he also debuted a new line of trading cards for Topps, the Garbage Pail Kids. The line subverted expectations for children’s media and featured grotesque art, like children barfing or becoming so fat that trash became trapped in their rolls of skin. It sparked a brief fad of gross-out art and humor that was popular among children and teens, as well as pushback from parents and even Mexico, who still has a law restricting imports of Garbage Pail Kids.
Spiegelman took a step back from the public after Maus was finished. He and Mouly spent the 90s creating covers for The New Yorker. And after the attacks on September 11th, 2001, he began working on In the Shadow of No Towers to work through his trauma from the experience. Spiegelman and his family had lived in the immediate vicinity of the World Trade Centers during the attack. He also left The New Yorker because of creative differences. From there he and Mouly expanded the scope of Spiegelman’s work. They created comics for children to promote literacy, edited and translated various volumes, and wrote MetaMaus, a book length analysis that offered a deeper explanation of the themes and motifs in Maus.
Maus
If you aren’t into comic books, you’re far more likely to say Maus changed your opinion on the legitimacy of comic books as a medium, than something like Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Though Watchmen is more widely lauded in comic book circles, Maus has had more widespread impact because of its biographical nature, extremely serious subject matter, and valuable lessons for the real world. “[It] was a watershed moment when it came out and everybody said, ‘God it’s about the holocaust, but it’s mice!’ It baffled everybody, but it put down the marker that comics as a medium [was] coming in for a landing.” It was also notably sold in bookstores instead of comic shops, which allowed it to reach a demographic other than the usual comic reader.
Depicting the Holocaust in the form of a comic made it more accessible. You don’t just read about it, but see it unfold around you. The visual medium makes Vladek and Anja’s degrading situations all the more obvious. You watch as the Nazis beat the people in concentration camps, and the perspective of the art puts you in the train cars standing shoulder to shoulder with other prisoners. The black and white coloring allows the comic to create moments of intense dread by using deep shadows to emphasize extreme emotions and danger. Maus has faced critique for its depiction of Jewish people as mice, Germans as cats, and the Polish as pigs. The cat and mouse depictions play into Nazi propaganda, while depicting the Poles as pigs plays into its own stereotypes. But this controversial decision also serves to enhance the message of the book. It tells us that even if the Jewish people really were mice, the Germans were cats, and the Poles were pigs, it wouldn’t have changed anything. There were Jewish people who ratted out their neighbors. Germans who didn’t actually want to kill people but were in too deep. Poles who did what they could help hiding Jews. They weren't defined by their stereotypes, even when depicted as those same stereotypes. This controversial decision tells us that the world, and people, are more complicated than nationality or race. Even if we really were different species, the Holocaust would still have been monstrous. But we aren’t even different species, so why should we hate each other?
One of the most impactful aspects of Maus is how must time it covers. Today we’re taught about the Holocaust, but it’s very easy to think of it like the solution to the board game Clue. It was the Nazis, with the Gas Chambers, in Auschwitz, and the Jewish people were the victims. But it wasn’t merely a single event, even one as horrible as mass genocide, and it didn’t happen in one place. The Holocaust was a series of events, policies, discrimination, torture, and industrialized genocide that played on existing antisemitism and lasted for over a decade. Around six million Jewish people died, a figure that many in America wouldn’t be able to list off the top of their head. It began as early as 1933, the year the first concentration camp was opened, and the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses began.
From there the Nazi’s used escalating policies of exclusion, removal of rights and property, and relocation to whittle away at the Jewish population. Starting small with the oldest, or those not fit to work, and slowly ramping up their campaign until they had millions of Jewish prisoners being executed in gas chambers and fed to ovens. Even as Nazi Germany retreated, persecution and execution of Jews remained one of their primary objectives. We see in Maus that they forced the Jewish prisoners to march away from Auschwitz and back into the heart of Germany as they retreated. This was such a central pillar of their regime, that they actively went out of their way to keep prisoners they fully intended to starve to death. The Holocaust wasn’t just genocide at the concentration camps during World War 2, but a concerted effort to grind away any and all aspects of the Jewish people for as long as the Nazi Party was in power.
For this reason, Maus has also been criticized for the portrayal of Art Spiegelman’s father. After everything he went through, some consider it wrong to depict Vladek as a petty hoarder who would fake a heart attack to make his son call him back. But Spiegelman himself admits that that his father wasn’t the best person, and to polish that picture wouldn’t do anything. In fact, showing all of his father’s flaws reveals the true breadth of the Holocaust. It didn’t target good or bad people. It targeted Jews, as well as gays, those with disabilities, and anyone else deemed unacceptable. It wasn’t about their actual character, who they were, or what they did. It was done to them because they were an easy target.
Vladek’s pettiness also underscores another note that can easily become lost on those of us studying the Holocaust today. 6 million Jewish people died, around 2/3rds of the Jewish population in Europe at the time. But that 1/3rd still survived, and they aren’t eternal victims. They went on to live their lives. With scars, yes, and lessons to teach if they’re willing, but no less alive. They exist beyond the Holocaust, making their way through life, like we all do. The contradiction of Vladek’s suffering, and his attitude towards others, sometimes being outright racist towards them, reminds us of life’s complexities. We must take the lessons we’ve learned from the past and apply it to the present, or else the riptide of prejudice will pull us down into the sea of oppression.
Art Spiegelman's Advice
It’s difficult to find writing advice from Art Spiegelman because he is primarily an artist. His writing style might be more accurately described as his dedication to the medium of comics as a form of storytelling. But even then, he isn’t drafting a new comic every week, and the comics he does write take years to be fully published. Instead, we can take inspiration from him. Art Spiegelman wanted to be an artist, and he made it work no matter what his situation. Whether he was drawing trading cards for a bubble gum company, printing his own comics to sell on the street corner, or working for The New Yorker, Spiegelman found ways to use his passion to support himself. In the changing landscape of 2024, and the rise of AI assisted tools that threatens to push out writers, artists, and actors, this is a lesson we can all take heart in. As old avenues close, new ones open for us. The internet has seen the rise of independent writers supported by their small but dedicated group of readers. New opportunities will appear, there’s a place for you and your work, you just need to find it.
Spiegelman Today
Today Art Spiegelman turns 76, and remains dedicated both to the comics industry, and preserving the message of Maus. In 2021 he began partnering with Robert Coover for a work called Street Cop, although no other information about the project is known. And in 2022, when a Tennessee school voted to ban Maus from their curriculum, Spiegelman worked to ensure the importance of Maus would not be forgotten. He talked with reports about the works message, and its relevance to the current day. As the dust settles from that event, Spiegelman seems to have taken another step back from the public life to work on his art.
Discussion Questions
1. In 2022 a Tennessee school voted to ban Maus from their curriculum and it caused a 753% spike in sales for the book. Trying to ban something only makes people more interested in what it has to say, and some bookstores even have a banned-books section to accommodate such readers. So why do book bans persist instead of letting a book fade from public memory?
2. Some have accused Art Spiegelman of being a man with only 1 good book. Regardless of whether its true or not, it can’t be denied that outside of Maus, most of Spiegelman’s work is relatively obscure. How does someone deal with being defined by their most popular work?
3. Art Spiegelman pushed comics to be better and say more after they stagnated under the comics code authority for decades, experimenting with unusual art styles and subject matter. Where can you find this kind of boundary pushing in literature today?
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