Art Spiegelman photographed by his daughter

It wasn't too long into his childhood in a working class neighborhood in Queens, New York, that Art Spiegelman fell utterly in love with the zany, colorful and instructive world of comic books. His parents were Polish-Jewish refugees who very much unaccustomed to American culture.

"And basically, comic books became my window into America," says the 61-year-old artist.

Those comic books included Donald Duck, Little Lulu and other standard comics fare of the time, but Spiegelman says the one that "marked him for life" were the early Mad comics.

"Mad introduced a new visual form of what irony and parody and satire might be. [It was] very anarchistic, and ... carried a message that made you stop, slow down and look around," he explains.

An autobiographical scene from Spiegelman's new introduction to Breakdowns recounts his love affair with Mad Magazine. Click image to view full cartoon

He adds that he studied Mad as some might study a religious text.

Spiegelman began drawing his own comics at his kitchen table and avidly pored through the stacks of used comic books his father bought him on his way home from work. He recalls that when he learned that one could actually earn a living drawing comics, his career path was clear.

"I wanted to be one of the people that did that," he says. "Comics were the most glowing thing I found around me. [Reading them] was like peeking into, not just the world, but into the brains of the people who made that world."

Surreal, edgy comics break the mold

Spiegelman was fortunate to attend New York's High School of Art and Design, perhaps the only school in the country at that time where comics drawing was taught as a course. At 18, he began a 20-year association with Topps Bubble Gum, where he helped create hugely successful novelty products like Garbage Pail Kids and Wacky Packages stickers and cards.

The cover of Breakdowns, Spiegelman's 1977 collection of underground comics and other drawings

"And I was also trying to make comics that weren't like anything else I saw," he says. "They weren't directed toward punch lines, and they were surreal. They had no possible place to be published!"

Spiegelman also used free association in his comics and leaned heavily on literary work, like the playwright Samuel Beckett's Endgame.

"Anyway, it led me toward very odd places," he says with a smile apparent.

One of those odd places was America's 1960s counterculture, where politically and socially edgy cartoonists like Robert Crumb, Justin Greene, S. Clay Wilson and others were busy breaking the old rules for what comics were supposed to be. Their strips featured psychedelic drawing styles and decidedly adult themes.

"These were things that were kind of out of control," says Spiegelman. "That was really exciting. I was trying to out-violent them, out-sex them, out-whatever [them]."
 
Spiegelman knew he had succeeded when Robert Crumb's wife banned him from the house.

"Maus" cartoons classics of Holocaust literature

A panel from the original three-page "Maus" spread in Breakdowns. Click image to view full page from "Maus" graphic novel

In 1977, Spiegelman published Breakdowns, a collection of his underground comics and other drawings. But the book, which was reissued in 2008 with a new 30-page comics introduction and other material, also included a three-page gem called "Maus" that dealt with two truly scary themes: Spiegelman's relationship with his father and his father's experience of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. 

"Maus" portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.

"It was about he and the family were first put into ghettos and how he ended up in Auschwitz, [but it was] told in a funny animal-comic style that seemed as much a collision as anything could be," says Spiegelman, adding, "It was the beginnings of finding my voice as a cartoonist."

"Maus" cover

Spiegelman expanded on "Maus" in Raw Magazine a pioneering avant-garde comics anthology he published with his wife, the artist Francoise Mouly, between 1980 and 1991. The first volume of Maus: a Survivor's Tale was published in 1986; the second, in 1991. It became an instant classic of Holocaust literature.
  
But Spiegelman says his main goals with the work were formal and artistic.

"It wasn't to make the world a better place. On some level, it was about trying to find out how come I'm even in the world when both my parents were supposed to be dead," he says. "Also, I really was thinking, 'Wouldn't it be cool to have a comic book be so long [that] it needed a bookmark and demanded the same kind of attention a book might demand?' Comics not as a story, but as a kind of essay in comics form."

Thus did the graphic novel become mainstream.

Current works explore post-9/11 world

"Maus" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. The following year, Spiegelman was offered a staff position at the prestigious New Yorker magazine. There Spiegelman was able to give full vent to his iconoclasm. His controversial 1993 Valentine's Day cover for example, showed a religious Jew and a young black woman sharing a passionate kiss. 

Spiegelman's iconic New Yorker magazine cover following the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center

But he left the magazine soon after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, which stood about a kilometer from his family's home. Although he had created a post-9/11 cover for the magazine that became one of the historical moment's iconic images he says he wanted to explore the personal crisis the event had provoked in him and felt that the raw authenticity of comics art was the way to express it.

Spiegelman then began to create a series of raw, disjointed drawings which were printed in a German newspaper and were later published as a book in the 2004 collection In the Shadow of No Towers. Spiegelman says the work mirrored his fragmented internal world and the fractured outer world of George W. Bush's America.

This page from In the Shadow of No Towers evokes the insecurity and fear many New Yorkers felt after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. Click image to enlarge

"What could have been more fractured than September 11th?," he asks, with traces of the anguish of that time still discernable in his tone. "The structure of comics is what really interested me, and here I was dealing with structures that were falling all around me: The structures of democracy and the structures of those buildings."

Today, Art Spiegelman continues to make comics that make the rest of us think. Current projects include editing, with Francoise Mouly, a "Toon Treasury" of classic children's comics. Like his other work, it may well turn out to be both funny and disturbingly serious stuff.