11 Regular/AICE EGP(Required)

REQUIRED Maus by Art Spiegelman

This novel is also avaiable digitally~Click Here

About the Author:

Art Spiegelman, (born February 15, 1948, Stockholm, Sweden), American author and illustrator whose Holocaust narratives Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (1991) helped to establish comic storytelling as a sophisticated adult literary medium.

Spiegelman immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1951. The family settled in Queens, New York, and Spiegelman, inspired by the clever artwork and subversive humour of Mad magazine, studied cartooning. As a teenager, he attended Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design, and he embarked on a career as a professional artist, selling illustrations to the Long Island Post. He began a two-decade run as a contributing artist and designer for Topps Chewing Gum, during which he helped develop the wildly successful Garbage Pail Kids and Wacky Packages trading cards. Spiegelman attended the State University of New York at Binghamton from 1965 to 1968, and he explored the alternative comics scene—most notably, the work of counterculture icon R. Crumb. After his mother’s suicide in 1968, Spiegelman left college without obtaining a degree, and he spent the early 1970s contributing to the flourishing comics underground. In 1972 he published two strips that represented a break from his previous work. The first was Maus, originally a three-page story that appeared in cartoonist Justin Green’s Funny Animals anthology. The second, Prisoner on the Hell Planet, was an attempt to understand his mother’s suicide through panels that evoked the bold intensity of German Expressionist woodcuts. These strips, along with other works, were collected in Breakdowns (1977).

In 1980 he cofounded Raw, an underground comic and graphics anthology, with his wife, Françoise Mouly. In it the pair sought to present graphic novels and “comix” (comics written for a mature audience) to a wider public. Recognized as the leading avant-garde comix journal of its era, Raw featured strips by European artists as well as previewed Spiegelman’s own work. Beginning in Raw’s second issue (December 1980), Spiegelman resumed the story of Maus, in which he related the wartime experiences of his parents, Vladek and Anja, both survivors of the Auschwitz death camp. Compelling in its ironic anthropomorphic animal depictions—the Jews and Nazis are drawn with the faces of mice and cats, respectively—its historical veracity, and its personal accounts, the story is made more complex by its contemporary framework. Spiegelman portrays himself as the adult Artie Spiegelman, who is attempting to understand and reconstruct his parents’ past while coping with the legacy of his mother’s death, his aging and often difficult father, and his own sense of guilt. The literary quality of Raw and Maus pushed comix into the mainstream, and their success led to Spiegelman working as a New York Times illustrator, a Playboy cartoonist, and a staff artist and writer for The New Yorker.