Art Spiegelman Maus Essay

Art Spiegelman's Maus stands "among the remarkable achievements in comics," according to Dale Luciano in Comics Journal. Maus, an epic parable of the Holocaust that substitutes mice and cats for human Jews and Nazis, marks a zenith in Spiegelman's artistic career. Prior to the Maus books, his was a name known primarily in the underground comics scene. He has been a significant presence in graphic art since his teen years, when he wrote, printed, and distributed his own comics magazine. By the end of his first year in college Spiegelman was employed by Topps Chewing Gum as a creative consultant, artist, and writer, an affiliation that wrought such pop culture artifacts as "Wacky-Packs" and "Garbage Pail Kids." In the early 1980s Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, produced the first issue of Raw, an underground comics (or as Spiegelman and Mouly refer to them, "comix") anthology that grew into a highly respected alternative press by the middle of the decade.

As a young child, his family moved to the United States, where he grew up in Rego Park, New York. Spiegelman recalled an early affinity for cartoons and comics. "I think . . . that I learned to read from looking at comics," he told Joey Cavalieri in Comics Journal, citing early exposure to the likes of Mad magazine and various superhero books. By the age of twelve Spiegelman was emulating the artists whose creations had captured his imagination and funnybone. As a hobby he began to draw his own cartoons, but as he told Cavalieri, "it was a pastime only for a brief period. It became an obsession very quickly." At the age of thirteen Spiegelman was illustrating for his school newspaper, and by his fourteenth year he had already made his first professional sale, a cover for the Long Island Post--for which he was paid fifteen