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Chapter twenty-one The Maus That Art Built THE BRONZE AGE: THE MAUS THAT ART BUILT 171 single greatest achievement in RAW was publishing his refined and reworked version of Maus, which had come far since its early days as a three-page strip in Funny Aminals. Spiegelman utilized the cartooning convention of anthropomorphized animals—Jews were depicted as mice, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, and Nazis as cats—in telling the story of his father’s Holocaust experience. “In doing that three-page strip,” Spiegelman remembered, “I realized that I had a lot of unfinished business.” So, starting in 1978, Spiegelman began interviewing his father, Vladek, and over the next three years he had collected enough material to write and illustrate the story of his father’s survival and its impact on his own psyche . Spiegelman immediately conceived Maus as a long-form work, something with the scope of a novel: “What I wanted to make was something I’d thought about as a result of reading ’60s fanzines, like Graphic Story Magazine. And in there there was a discussion of [early 20th-century Belgian woodcut master Frans] Masereel, and people like that. And the idea that there could be such a thing as the Great American Novel, but in comics form, was a notion that I vaguely remember seeing there, and it corresponded with something I wanted!” Starting with RAW #2, the first six chapters of Maus appeared in RAW from 1980 to 1985. These six chapters would be collected in the 1986 graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. But Maus’s journey from RAW to chain bookstores wasn’t an easy one. After the first few chapters of Maus were serialized in RAW, Spiegelman began looking for a publisher. He waded through dozens of rejection letters—until, finally, Pantheon made him an unusual offer: the publisher agreed to proceed only if the completed work came out that very year. It was a curious demand, Spiegelman thought, as he had only completed the first volume of the overall work, and that portion had taken eight years. Then he learned that an article had appeared in the New York Times Book Review, which “talked about this work in progress in comics form that was the important literary achievement of our age—astonishing coverage given the fact that the Times Book Review never covered works in progress and certainly never comics-related material.” Spiegelman would have been happy waiting until he had finished the Art Spiegelman’s Art Spiegelman’s To this day, Art Spiegelman is the only graphic novelist to win the Pulitzer Prize. Nadja Spiegelman© 2005. whole saga and collecting it all into one big book, but then he heard about a certain animated movie that was already in development: “I was very upset to learn about what would become An American Tale, which I’m quite sure was inspired by Maus. I didn’t want to have my book come out after some giant Spielberg-produced, feature-length animation; I didn’t want to be perceived as a twisted version of Spielberg’s more delightful and innocent use of mice as Jews. And so I really wanted my book to come out before this film was finished. The only way to do it would be to publish part one immediately, rather than wait till I’d finished part two, which would have been years more. At first Pantheon said, ‘Forget it,’ but once requests for the book started coming in as a result of the Times Book Review piece, they said yes, and then quickly put it out.” The critical acclaim that Maus received from the mainstream press was unprecedented in the American comics industry. Along with the seminal graphic novels Watchmen (written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons) and Dark Knight Returns (written/drawn by Frank Miller), Maus is considered one of the troika of works that did the most to demystify the comics medium for the adult public in the 1980s. Even more than A Contract with God or To the Heart of the Storm, Maus is easily the most famous Jewish-themed graphic novel ever published, which prompts the question: How influenced was Spiegelman by Eisner’s work? “I’d already been working on Maus when Will’s first book came out,” replied Spiegelman. “And I never wanted the phrase ‘graphic novel’ personally. I like the word ‘comics’ well enough. I mean, everything’s a misnomer, so that was an...

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