Author of the week: Art Spiegelman

last updated 8 January 2015

Art Spiegelman is still haunted by Maus, said David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. Two decades after he became the first comic-book artist to win a Pulitzer—for a work that was centered on his father’s experiences at Auschwitz and that depicted Jews as mice and Nazis as cats—the 63-year-old author is not done reckoning with the project. “I’m blessed and cursed by this thing I made that obviously looms large for me and for others,” he says. “The result is that I can’t do this thing that seems quite easy, which is: ‘That’s that, and now I’m working on a new thing.’” MetaMaus, a new collection of interviews and sketches that deconstruct his defining work, almost exists to prove his point. “If you can’t outrun it,” he says, “just stare the damned beast down.”

The new book digs deep into Maus’s creation, said Neal Conan in NPR.org. Of the decision to tackle the Holocaust in a comic book, Spiegelman says, “I wouldn’t have made a really great ballet about the Holocaust.” The choice was daring, but it opened the door for other artists to use the medium in a new way. “That’s what’s hard to remember—just what disrepute comics were held in,” the author says. Though he suffered deep guilt about the success of Maus—“because it was built on so much murder”—he can’t imagine not having followed through on the idea. “It was my way of understanding and making a monument on paper to what happened, not just to my parents but, by implication, beyond.”