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Jacobowitz, Susan. “'Words and Pictures Together': An Interview with Art Spiegelman.” Jstor, Regents of the University of California, 1994, www.jstor.org/stable

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"Words and Pictures Together": An Interview with Art Spiegelman

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"Words and Pictures Together": An Interview with Art Spiegelman

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This source solidifies the fact that Spiegelman went to Auschwitz himself to do research for the book. It also says that he used a lot os tapes and audio from first person accounts. He used "historical, personal, and family information" and pulled them together to form Maus.

-Tess Murphy

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This article, specifically the fifth paragraph, talks about how hard it was for Spiegelman to research this topic, especially during this time. He recounts that he had to largely rely on firsthand accounts from his parents and other survivors and his own trips to the concentration camp in Poland. Because of how much evidence had been destroyed and Spiegelman’s limited resources, he says that every piece of information he needed for his book was “hard-won”, which shows the complexities that came along with undertaking a project like this and why Maus had to investigate so many different types of historical evidence.

-Grace Savage

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"Survival is having children even if they hate you," Art Spiegelman wrote in his notebook in 1985, while still working on his two-volume comics masterpiece, "Maus," which would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize. Subtitled "A Survivor's Tale," "Maus" recreated the horrors of the Holocaust - as experienced by Art's father, Vladek, and mother, Anja - casting Jews as mice and Germans as cats. But it also explored the difficult relationship between tetchy skinflint Vladek and his resentful son with touching and discomfiting honesty.

The richly rewarding 25th-anniversary volume METAMAUS (Pantheon, $35) reveals just how history has repeated itself for Art Spiegelman. Vladek survived the Holocaust only to have a son with whom he never truly made peace: "My anger against him was so free-floating and easy to access," Spiegelman explains, that "it was just our leitmotif." Art survived Vladek but still struggles to come to terms with the legacy of his own creation. "The success of 'Maus' called my bluff," he says ruefully. "O.K., O.K.! So you're a genius! So now what?!" In the aftermath of his book's success, he admits, he has mostly been "trying to wriggle out from under my own achievement."

"MetaMaus" consists primarily of an expansive, fascinating interview with Spiegelman conducted by Hillary Chute, a scholar of contemporary comics who teaches at the University of Chicago. The beautifully designed hardcover also includes abundant archival material, conversations with Spiegelman's wife (Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker's art editor) and children, and transcripts of his original sessions with Vladek. (For the true completist, an accompanying DVD offers audio recordings of those interviews, together with reproductions of Spiegelman's notebooks, over 7,000 additional drawings, insightful essays by Chute and Lawrence Weschler, and an annotated electronic copy of the complete "Maus.")

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Credit... Illustration from "MetaMaus"

Exhaustive? Sure. But few works of literature published in the past quarter-century bear scrutiny and analysis as well as "Maus," a complicated, thorny book that became a landmark simultaneously in the disparate worlds of memoir, comics and Holocaust history. Not that you'll find Spiegelman spending much time considering his book's place in the literary canon; he and Chute, thankfully, concentrate mostly on the book's long gestation, beginning in the early 1970s with a three-page comic Spiegelman drew for a San Francisco underground-comix book and ending with the publication of "Maus II," in 1991. (The 25th anniversary is dated to the first volume's publication in book form, in 1986.)

Spiegelman recalls the struggles of researching "Maus" at a time before scholarship was widely available to a mass audience. Pre-Internet, he depended on his parents' collection of pamphlets written and drawn by survivors, and on research visits to Poland. On his second trip to Birkenau, in 1987, Spiegelman was baffled to find a perfectly preserved barracks where once there had been only rubble; it turned out to be a re-creation built for a Holocaust movie, left standing by Polish authorities because it looked accurate. He admits he was jealous of the moviemakers' unlimited resources, when "every scrap of information I needed for 'Maus' was so hard-won." Later, just selling the book to publishers was a challenge; "MetaMaus" reprints a revealing collection of rejection letters that will surely pain their authors, some of whom still work in publishing today.

When the book came out, of course, it was a rousing success - critically and commercially - although Spiegelman also remembers the responses that were less than understanding, at home and abroad. "Don't you think that a comic book about Auschwitz is in bad taste?" one angry reporter asked him when the book was published in Germany. "No," Spiegelman replied, "I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste."

"MetaMaus" is full of such unexpected details, many of them quite touching. I was overwhelmed by a simple Spiegelman family tree, packed with 85 Old World names. On the next two pages, the same genealogy is displayed as it existed immediately after World War II; it contains 13 names and 72 empty spaces. (Among the lost: Art's "phantom brother," Richieu, who died in 1943, four years before Art was born.)

This book also serves as a master class on the making and reading of comics, highlighted by Spiegelman's close analyses of dozens of important points in the text. Especially instructive are his observations about the story's bittersweet final page - a happy ending that isn't truly happy, made of six perfectly paced panels, a tombstone and a signature. The last frame encapsulates in one simple moment the artfulness behind the tale we've just read, and the uneasy combination of filial pride and anger that flowed through "Maus" and flows through "MetaMaus" as well. "I'm tired from talking, Richieu," the elderly Vladek Spiegelman says to his son Art, turning over in his bed, "and it's enough stories for now."

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"Survival is having children even if they hate you," Art Spiegelman wrote in his notebook in 1985, while still working on his two-volume comics masterpiece, "Maus," which would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize. Subtitled "A Survivor's Tale," "Maus" recreated the horrors of the Holocaust - as experienced by Art's father, Vladek, and mother, Anja - casting Jews as mice and Germans as cats.

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“An Interview with Art Spiegelman, Author of Maus | from the WTTW Archive.” All Arts, The WNET Group, 21 Aug. 2022, www.allarts.org/programs/from-the-wttw-archi

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In the Interview, Spiegelman states that the "tapes are the core of what eventually grew into 'Maus'". This quote is emphasizing the importance of eyewitness testimony in his research and creation of the graphic novel.
- Halle Middleton

Additionally, he says he "actually found a shrink who was a survivor of the death camp. So [he] was able to do this classic transference onto a father figure who was much more articulate and sensitive than Vladek was and worked [his] way into and through that, and then incorporated that into the book somewhere." This further emphasizes how important first person accounts were to Maus.
-Tess Murphy

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These panels create a timeline of Spiegelman’s father’s time in the concentration camp. Vladek gives his best guess of how long he was there based on the amount of time he spent in each place or job. It is an example of a first person account; Spiegelman acquired this information by talking to a survivor. While the timeline itself may not be the most accurate, since Vladek had no real way of telling time inside the camp, the testimony itself could not be anymore authentic or true.

-Grace Savage

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First person accounts helped Spiegelman write Maus when documentation didn't help. Even though Spiegelman has to do a bit of imagining to fill in gaps, the first person accounts are important for getting visual and other small details. With documentation purposely destroyed, relying on people to tell their stories is a common thread throughout the book, especially with his father.

-Tess Murphy

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Spiegelman's drawings of the Cremd are appropriately very cold. His drawing of the building involves very densely packed and dark crosshatching and in each panel drawing, there are no people around which is creating a very haunting and scary feeling. By leaving the panels void of life, Spiegelman is allowing the viewer to imagine what horrors that went on here. Adding to this sense of coldness is the map of exactly what the chambers looked like. Labeling each part of the gas chamber is giving the reader a deeper understanding of just how real this place was and is another visual tool adding to the sense of haunting that seems to consume this page and the ones around it.

- Halle Middleton