Maus (comics) - Background

Background

Art Spiegelman was born on 15 February 1948 in Sweden to Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors Vladek and Anja Spiegelman. His brother Richieu was poisoned by an aunt in order to avoid capture by the Nazis four years before Art's birth. He immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1951. Growing up, his mother would occasionally talk about Auschwitz, but his father did not want him to know about it.

Spiegelman developed an early interest in comics and began drawing professionally at 16. He spent a month in Binghamton State Mental Hospital in 1968 after a nervous breakdown. Shortly after getting out, his mother committed suicide. The elder Spiegelman was not happy with his son's involvement in the hippie movement. Spiegelman said that when he bought himself a German Volkswagen, it damaged their already-strained relationship "beyond repair". Around this time Spiegelman had been reading in fanzines about graphic artists such as Frans Masereel, who had made wordless novels. The discussions in those fanzines about making the great American novel in comics inspired him.

Spiegelman became a key figure in the underground comix movement of the 1970s, both as cartoonist and editor. Justin Green was a cartoonist who had produced the semi-autobiographical Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary in 1972, an influential work which inspired other underground cartoonists to open themselves up and produce more personal, revealing work. The same year, Green asked Speigelman to contribute a three-page strip for the first issue of Funny Aminals, which Green edited. Spiegelman wanted to do a strip about racism, and at first considered focusing on African Americans, with cats taking on the role of the Ku Klux Klan chasing African-American mice. Instead, he turned to the Holocaust. The strip was called "Maus" and depicted Nazi cats, called die Katzen, persecuting Jewish mice. The tale was narrated to a mouse named "Mickey". After finishing the strip, Spiegelman visited his father to show him the finished work, which had been partially based an an anecdote he had heard about his father's Auschwitz experience. His father gave him further background on the story, which piqued Spiegelman's interest to learn more. Spiegelman did a series of taped interviews over four days with his father, which provided the basis of the longer Maus. Spiegelman followed up with extensive research, reading survivors' accounts and talking to friends and family who had also survived. One "really important" source for him was a series of Polish pamphlets published after the war which detailed what happened to the Jews by region. From this he was able to get very detailed information about Sosnowiec.

In 1973, he produced a strip for Short Order Comix #1 about his mother's suicide called "Prisoner on the Hell Planet". The same year, he edited an explicitly pornographic, psychedelic book of quotations, which he dedicated to his mother.

Spiegelman spent the rest of the 1970s building his reputation making short, avant-garde comics. He moved back to New York from San Francisco in 1975, which he admitted to his father only in 1977, by which time he had decided he wanted to work on a "very long comic book". He began another series interviews with his father in 1978, and visited Auschwitz in 1979. The story was serialized in a comics and graphics magazine he and Françoise began in 1980 called Raw.