rt, who is now 46, was raised in a Queens,
N.Y., apartment in the psychic shadow of
the death camps. Like many children of
Holocaust survivors, he was curious
about his parents' past, but afraid to
ask about it. That made him Jewish
in perhaps the worst possible way. Because of that, he
was not at all at ease with being in a Jewish skin.
Mr. Spiegelman is no longer in Queens. After side
trips and side gigs in which he edited underground
comic magazines in San Francisco and drew bubble
gum comics in Manhattan, Mr. Spiegelman wrestled
and re-wrestled with his past and his parents' history,
filtered it through his comic book-skewed mind and
produced two brazen, bold, uncompromising accounts
of his family, himself and the Shoah — Maus I: My
Father Bleeds History (published in 1986) and Maus
II: And Here My Troubles Began (published in 1991).
In each copiously illustrated volume, the Jews are
mice, the Germans are cats, all gentiles are pigs. In
each volume, neat, proper comic book panels — the sort
of visual niceties usually reserved for Mickey Mouse
or Brenda Starr — encapsulate the plight of Mr.
Spiegelman's parents; the terse, taut relationship be-
tween Art and his father; the frustrations of seeking
the truth from a man too bitter, too self-absorbed to
speak it.
Maus I and H were critically acclaimed, sold in the
hundreds of thousands, translated into 17 languages.
stereo and TV equipment and a library. More impor-
tantly for an artist, he has the freedom to profession-
ally more or less do what he wishes.
So when his publisher asked him after Maus II what
he wanted to do next, he chose not to re-enter the world
of genocide.
"I felt a bit trapped by Maus," he said recently, sit-
ting at a kitchen table in his studio, "as if I was being
given a fairly specific role to play. I didn't want to be
like the guy who played Superman on TV and couldn't
get another role afterward. I didn't want to be the Elie
Wiesel of the comic book."
With his latest book, The Wild Party, Mr. Spiegel-
man has proven that he's no Mr. Wiesel and has more
self-dimensions than the era from roughly 1935-45.
The Wild Party is a sharp, non-genocidal, Judenfrei
turn from the Maus duo, which were death- and angst-
filled. In it, Mr. Spiegelman has illustrated a steamy,
sybaritic, hedonistic jazz-age novel in verse by the now-
unknown Joseph Moncure March. Maus is full of draw-
ings of hounded, frightened Jews; The Wild Party is
full of drawings of promiscuous flappers; violent, drank-
en men; hyper-suggestive, near-erotic images. Of the
latter, a New York Times critic wrote two weeks ago,
"Good cheap rhymes are meant to be illustrated as sure-
ly as they are meant to be read aloud. Art Spiegelman
is the right man for the job. His drawings are like de-
monic woodcuts ..."
The Wild Party is to the Holocaust what Danielle
Spiegelman
claims
The New Yorker
cover was a
"Valentine card
to New York."
01
In 1992, the books earned Mr. Spiegelman a "special
citation" from the Pulitzer Prizes. He has been besieged
with offers from Hollywood to turn his "Maus" vision
into a film. Animation, even puppets, have been pro-
posed. The last time someone tried to con him into
putting "Maus" on celluloid, he puckishly (and frus-
tratingly) told them to use trained mice. The joke fell
flat. Mr. Spiegelman is so insistent that "Maus" not be-
come a film that he fired his first agent, for whom a
movie project had become a passion.
Despite being depressed after Maus I appeared ("I
can't believe I'm going to be a father in a couple of
months. My father's ghost still hangs over me"), the
two books served Mr. Spiegelman well. He has a spa-
cious studio in New York's Soho, three blocks from his
apartment, complete with a futon couch, a kitchen,
Steele is to fine literature. Which, of course, is precisely
what Mr. Spiegelman wanted: "I thought this would
be a good holiday from Maus, a way to let my verbal
center shut down and regroup. The book has virtually
no Jews, except for one minor character. And no Nazis.
"This was useful as a way to sidestep the question
that's been hounding me ever since Maus II was fin-
ished, 'So when's Maus HI coming out?' The Wild Party
could indicate that other territories have a hold on me,
including one operating on the pleasure principle. In
the introduction to The Wild Party, I say that any
decade before my birth has a strong nostalgic pull on
me. In fact, I suppose that the world before genocide is
about the easiest place to move to let the pleasure prin-
ciple operate. There were obviously other things of con-
cern to me and I needed to poke at them without a lot
of eyeballs on my shoulder saying they wanted to see
something else."
`All You Need Is Love'
The Wild Party pretty much blows any expectations
about Mr. Spiegelman out of the water, even though
Hildegard Bachert, co-director of the art gallery that
represents him, Manhattan's Galerie St. Etienne, said
she "can see in it Art's great illustrative qualities. And
I also see the necessity for him to have done this as a
human being. It was purposefully something to get
Maus out of his skin. But whether The Wild Party has
the great artistic and social value that Maus has re-
mains to be seen."
Even Mr. Spiegelman freely admits that The Wild
Party has "no socially redeeming value." But the wiz-
ard of illustrations is still afloat, wielding his drawing
pen on a semi-regular basis for the New Yorker (where
he has been a contributing editor and artist since No-
vember 1992) and playing around with two or three
book projects, one of which would be primarily textu-
al.
It is at the New Yorker, and especially on its covers,
that motherlode for any great American illustrator,
that Mr. Spiegelman has been able to break away from
the Maus trap. And where he has been able to con-
tinue in the spirit that basically echoes a lament from,
of all people, Charles Schultz of "Peanuts" fame. In
1970, Mr. Schultz complained that he was "surpris[ed]
... that so many cartoonists working in such a mar-
velously flexible medium have not dealt more closely
with the real essential aspects of life, such as love,
friendship and day-tO-day difficulties of simply living
and getting along with other people."
It was in his debut on the New Yorker's cover, on Feb.
15, 1993, that Mr. Spiegelman gave the non-Maus world
a sample of his vision of the world's "love, friendship
and day-to-day difficulties." The cover, a Chasidic man
kissing a black woman, stopped jaded New Yorkers in
their tracks. It stunned and flummoxed. It took one's
breath away. Orthodox and other Jews complained
that it portrayed in a lascivious, almost libelous man-
ner a member of a Jewish sect that is so prim that its
male members do not even shake hands publicly with
members of the opposite sex. Blacks and others com-
plained that the cover perpetuated a hoary stereotype
about blacks: They're oversexed and driven by nothing
but libido.
Yet, all Mr. Spiegelman wanted to do, as he wrote
in that issue of the New Yorker, was to deliver a "Valen-
tine card to New York, a wish for the reconciliation of
seemingly unbridgeable differences in the form of a
symbolic kiss.... Once a year, perhaps, it's permissible,
even if just for a moment, to close one's eyes, see be-
yond the tragic complexities of modern life, and imag-
ine that it might really be true that 'All you need is
love."
It's now two years since the cover appeared, and
no one who saw it has forgotten it. (In his forward to a
recent book he edited, Blacks and Jews: Alliances and
Arguments, critic Paul Berman observed, "What kind
of zealous touchiness can sour a valentine's sweetness
into a multi-ethnic offense? Mightn't love be a good
thing between the blacks and Jews of Brooklyn, and
between blacks and Jews everywhere, and between all
peoples? Spiegelman's illustration asks that question.
And the more you look at his artfully mischievous kiss,
the more your head aches with the thrust and coun-
terthrust of your own answers.")
Despite the wrath he unleashed, Mr. Spiegelman is
content with the infamous cover — and would do it all
over again.
"I knew it would raise eyebrows," he said. "I didn't
know I would raise them that high. But I thoroughly
enjoyed the aftermath. Everyone was angry. It was
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