Art-AC.jpg

Features

How Art Spiegelman made comics what they are today

graphic-novels-article-card.png

Reading lists

17 mesmerising graphic novels

Art Spiegelman at 70: 'This 500-pound mouse chases me around''

art-spiegelman-inline.jpg

Interviews

‘I’ll always have a 500-pound mouse chasing me around’

Breakdowns

The creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus explores the comics form...and how it formed him! 
**In a new flexibound format with an updated afterword** 
 
 
This book opens with Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, creating vignettes of the people, events, and comics that shaped Art Spiegelman. It traces the artist's evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son. 
 
 
The second part presents a facsimile of Breakdowns, the long-sought after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s, the book that triggers these memories. Breakdowns established the mode of formally sophisticated comics that transformed the medium, and includes the prototype of Maus, cubist experiments, an essay on humor, and the definitive genre-twisting pulp story "Ace Hole-Midget Detective." 
 
 
Pulling all this together is an illustrated essay that looks back at the sixties as the artist pushes sixty, and explains the obsessions that brought these works into being. Poignant, funny, complex, and innovative, Breakdowns alters the terms of what can be accomplished in a memoir. 
 
 
'Art Spiegelman is the single most important comic creator' Alan Moore

Close students and fans of Spiegelman's work view Breakdowns as a sort of Rosetta Stone that offers a master key to his intricate and varied visual idiom, revealing his enormous and often overlooked range as an artist

Art Spiegelman has been a staff artist and contributing editor at the New Yorker, as well as the cofounder/coeditor of RAW, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics. In addition to Maus - which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and twice nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award - he is the author of Breakdowns and In the Shadow of No Towers. In September 2022, the National Book Foundation announced that he would receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in New York City with his wife, Françoise Mouly, and a cat named Voodoo.

**In a new flexibound format with an updated afterword** 
 
This book opens with Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, creating vignettes of the people, events, and comics that shaped Art Spiegelman. It traces the artist's evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son. 
 
 
The second part presents a facsimile of Breakdowns, the long-sought after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s, the book that triggers these memories. Breakdowns established the mode of formally sophisticated comics that transformed the medium, and includes the prototype of Maus, cubist experiments, an essay on humor, and the definitive genre-twisting pulp story "Ace Hole-Midget Detective." 
 
 
Pulling all this together is an illustrated essay that looks back at the sixties as the artist pushes sixty, and explains the obsessions that brought these works into being. Poignant, funny, complex, and innovative, Breakdowns alters the terms of what can be accomplished in a memoir.

Selected Writing

Maus Now

A richly illustrated book in which leading cultural critics, authors, and academics reflect on the radical achievement and innovation of Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Maus 
 
'The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust' Wall Street Journal 
___________________________________________________________________________ 
 
It is hard to overstate Art Spiegelman's effect on postwar American culture. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author is one of our most influential contemporary artists, and his masterpiece Maus has shaped the fields of literature, history, and art. Collecting responses to the work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status, Maus Now is a new collection of essays that sees writers such as Philip Pullman, Robert Storr, Ruth Franklin, and others approaching the complexity of Maus from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions. 
 
Offering translations of important French, Hebrew, and German essays on Maus for the first time, this collection edited by American literary scholar Hillary Chute - an expert on comics and graphic narratives - assembles the world's best writing on this classic work of graphic testimony. 
___________________________________________________________________________ 
 
'The first masterpiece in comic book history' The New Yorker on Maus 
 
'No summary can do justice to Spiegelman's narrative skill' Adam Gopnik on Maus 
 
'Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect' Philip Pullman on Maus

Chute has been leading the charge with some of the most sophisticated comics criticism to date

The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust

The first masterpiece in comic book history

Wonderful . . . Chute's often lovely, sensitive discussions of individual expression in independent comics seem so right and true

New York Times Book Review on Why Comics?

ART SPIEGELMAN is a contributing editor and artist for the New Yorker. His drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus, which was also nominated for the National Book Critics Award. He lives in New York. 
 
HILLARY CHUTE is an American literary scholar and an expert on comics and graphic narratives. She is Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University and the author or editor of seven titles on comics, including, most recently, her book, Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. She is a comics and graphic novels columnist for The New York Times Book Review.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Art Spiegelman is one of our most influential contemporary artists, and it is hard to overstate his effect on postwar American culture and the world of comics. Maus has shaped the fields of literature, history, and art, and enlivened our collective sense of what these practices can accomplish. Collecting responses to the work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status, Maus Now sees writers such as Philip Pullman, Adam Gopnik, Ruth Franklin, and others approaching the complexity of Maus from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions. Organized into three loosely chronological sections ("Contexts", "Problems of Representation" and "Legacy"), the book offers translations of important French, Hebrew, and German essays on Maus for the first time. 
 
Maus is revelatory, and generative, in profound and long-lasting ways. With this collection, American literary scholar Hillary Chute, an expert on comics and graphic narratives, assembles the world's best writing on this classic work of graphic testimony.

In the Shadow of No Towers

For Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were both highly personal and intensely political. In the Shadow of No Towers, his first new book of comics since the groundbreaking Maus, is a masterful and moving account of the events and aftermath of that tragic day. 
 
Spiegelman and his family bore witness to the attacks in their lower Manhattan neighborhood: his teenage daughter had started school directly below the towers days earlier, and they had lived in the area for years. But the horrors they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman, as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda. 
 
He responded in the way he knows best. In an oversized, two-page-spread format that echoes the scale of the earliest newspaper comics (which Spiegelman says brought him solace after the attacks), he relates his experience of the national tragedy in drawings and text that convey-with his singular artistry and his characteristic provocation, outrage, and wit-the unfathomable enormity of the event itself, the obvious and insidious effects it had on his life, and the extraordinary, often hidden changes that have been enacted in the name of post-9/11 national security and that have begun to undermine the very foundation of American democracy.

Art Spiegelman...to the comics world is a Michelangelo and a Medici both, an influential artist who is also an impresario and an enabler of others...[Maus's] great innovation-unmatched and possibly unmatchable-was in its combination of style and subject....It would be almost impossible to overstate the influence of Maus among other artists

Spiegelman has become one of The New Yorker's most sensational artists, in recent years drawing illustrations for covers that are meant not just to be plainly understood but also to reach up and tattoo your eyeballs with images....From his Holocaust saga [Maus] in which Jewish mice are exterminated by Nazi cats, to the The New Yorker covers guaranteed to offend, to a wild party that ends in murder: Art Spiegelman's cartoons don't fool around

For one moment on an otherwise perfect fall day in Manhattan, time stood absolutely still, and since then history has rushed past too quickly for any artist to keep up. This disjunction between experience and understanding gives In the Shadow of No Towers something so much more than a linear narrative: It is a love letter to a city that this artist, no matter his fears, could not bring himself to leave

Maus I & II Paperback Box Set

A SPECIAL-EDITION BOXSET CREATED TO CELEBRATE THE PULITZER-PRIZE WINNING GRAPHIC NOVEL'S 40TH ANNIVERSARY 
 
'The first masterpiece in comic book history' The New Yorker 
 
'The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust' Wall Street Journal 
 
A brutally moving work of art -- widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written -- MAUS recounts the chilling experiences of the author's father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. 
 
Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma. 
 
This paperback box set includes MAUS in its original two-volume format, re-released with an exclusive sixteen-page booklet designed by the artist himself. 
___________________________________________________________________________ 
 
'A brutally moving work of art' Boston Globe 
 
'No summary can do justice to Spiegelman's narrative skill' Adam Gopnik 
 
 'Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect' Philip Pullman 
 
 'A capital-G Genius' Michael Chabon

No summary can do justice to Spiegelman's narrative skill

Since its first publication in 1987, Maus has achieved a celebrity that few other comics have ever done...if the notion of a canon means anything, Maus is there at the heart of it. Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect

The paperback boxed set of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel in its original two-volume format re-released to include a sixteen-page booklet designed by the artist. Acclaimed as "the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust" (Wall Street Journal), Maus is considered "the first masterpiece in comic book history" (The New Yorker). 
 
 A brutally moving work of art-widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written-Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author's father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. 
 
 Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma

The Complete MAUS

2021 is the 35th anniversary of Maus - the million-selling, Pulitzer-winning, father-son memoir about the Holocaust

The first and only graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize, MAUS is a brutally moving work of art about a Holocaust survivor -- and the son who survives him 
 
'The first masterpiece in comic book history' The New Yorker 
 
Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Approaching the unspeakable through the diminutive (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. 
 
Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits, studying the bloody pawprints of history and tracking its meaning for those who come next. 
 
HAILED AS THE GREATEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF ALL TIME, THIS COMBINED, DEFINITIVE EDITION INCLUDES MAUS I: A SURVIVOR'S TALE AND MAUS II. 
___________________ 
 
'The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust' Wall Street Journal 
 
'A brutally moving work of art' Boston Globe 
 
'No summary can do justice to Spiegelman's narrative skill' Adam Gopnik 
 
'Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect' Philip Pullman 
 
'A capital-G Genius' Michael Chabon

The first masterpiece in comic book history

One of the clichés about the Holocaust is that you can't imagine it - Spiegelman disproves this theory

In the tradition of Aesop and Orwell, it serves to shock and impart powerful resonance to a well-documented subject. The artwork is so accomplished, forceful and moving

Spiegelman has turned the exuberant fantasy of comics inside out by giving us the most incredible fantasy in comics' history: something that actually occurred. Maus is terrifying not for its brutality, but for its tenderness and guilt

Maus is a book that cannot be put down, truly, even to sleep...when you finish Maus, you are unhappy to have left that magical world and long for the sequel that will return you to it

A remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness...an unfolding literary event

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in 'drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust'

A quiet triumph, moving and simple - impossible to describe accurately, and impossible to achieve in any medium but comics

All too infrequently, a book comes along that' s as daring as it is acclaimed. Art Spiegelman's Maus is just such a book

A remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution... at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir, and a comic book. Brilliant, just brilliant

Maus is a masterpiece, and it's in the nature of such things to generate mysteries, and pose more questions than they answer. But if the notion of a canon means anything, Maus is there at the heart of it. Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect

Spiegelman's Maus changed comics forever. Comics now can be about anything

Reading [his work] has been an amazing lesson in storytelling

It can be easy to forget how much of a game-changer Maus was.

Art Spiegelman is a contributing editor and artist for the New Yorker. His drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus, which was also nominated for the National Book Critics Award. He lives in New York.

Art Spiegelman

MAUS is widely renowned as one of the greatest pieces of art and literature ever written about the Holocaust. Readers adore it, and it's studied in colleges and universities all over the world. 
 
In MetaMAUS, Art Spiegelman re-enters the world of his Pulitzer-prize winning graphic novel to probe the questions that it often evokes: Why the Holocaust? Why mice? Why comics? 
 
Including never-before-seen sketches, alternate drafts, family photos, diary entries and the transcript of his interviews with his father Vladek as well as an interview with Art himself, MetaMAUS is as ground-breaking as the masterpiece whose creation it reveals. 
 
The perfect gift, this vital companion is a must-read for any fan of MAUS.

Art Spiegelman

Books by Art Spiegelman

Articles featuring Art Spiegelman

How Art Spiegelman made comics what they are today

17 mesmerising graphic novels

‘I’ll always have a 500-pound mouse chasing me around’

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter