alize that I couldn't keep it so abstract. It became im-
portant to show that these people were killed because
they were Jews."
There was a certain historic logic to using mice as
Jews: Through the ages, both have been hunted — and
killed. But, said Mr. Spiegelman, there was also an in-
tuitive graphics logic to using mice.
"One of the first things a baby can recognize," he said,
"is one of these 'Have A Nice Day' faces. The more
stripped down the image, the more possibilities for em-
pathic projection. The 'mans' head, by being a simple tri-
angular head that is relatively incapable of depicted
expression, actually allows for more projected expres-
sion to take place for the reader. It's the same way that
Little Orphan Annie's lack of eyeballs are more expres-
sive than the eyeballs in the rest of the comics."
Although Mr. Spiegelman's prose can match most of
what's in the New Yorker, he prefers comics because of
the double-whammy he said they convey to the read-
er/viewer at a very subliminal, almost neuron-like lev-
el. A few years ago, for instance, he wrote that comics'
strength lies in their synthetic ability to "approximate
mental language as opposed to actual human thought."
- In his Soho studio recently, he explained this some-
what arcane formulation: "The way one thinks is a com-
bination of telegraphic language. I know that simply by
the fact that it takes so much longer to say something
than to think something. Our 'thought words' are corn-
pacted and our thought processes are an efficient ver-

The Wild Party
is steamy,
sybaritic,
hedonistic.

Of The Wild Party (above), Spiegelman said, "The world before genocide is about the easiest place to move
to let the pleasure principle operate."

Before the war, he said, his father had been Ortho-
dox. "The Holocaust made him an atheist, which is to
say, Conservative. My mother was more secular. Around
the age of 14, I ducked out of Yom Kippur services and
had a sausage pizza. When lightning didn't strike, my
days as a theologian were numbered."
Since
briefly flirting with Zen Buddhism in college,
_
Mr. Spiegelman has been on the fringes of organized re-
ligion: "The God that failed." He is now "more interest-
ed in Jewishness than in Judaism. I relish the position
of being a ruthless cosmopolitan, in being a Diaspora
U) Jew."
But in some way, Jewishness has always pervaded
a
Mr. Spiegelman's art. As a kid, he discovered comics and
., Mad magazine, all of which, he says, were inspired and
T
--. drawn by Jews: "Stan Lee (of Marvel Comics) was Stan-
ley Lieber. Harvey Kurtzman was at Mad. Al Feldstein
1-- did horror comics."
Over the years, Mr. Spiegelman has even concluded
c- cc -)
that
the 1950s-era Tales From the Crypt, which were os-
1---
L1.1
ca tensibly about zombies and spirits, were really "post-
"' Auschwitz comics."
=
In high school, first he turned down an offer to draw
F-
a syndicated comic strip ("I was too young to get mar-
ried and die"), then he tried to have his work published
in the new underground paper the East Village Other.

64

"The editor said they were interesting cartoons, but
could I do something with more sex and dope in it? So
I went to college and learned about sex and dope."
Matriculation was short-lived (probably because it
was mostly copulatory and pharmaceutical). Young
Spiegelman dropped out, and his father kept hoping he
"would outgrow this comics thing and do something use-
ful with my life."
No such luck. Mr. Spiegelman got involved with un-
derground comics on the East and West coasts, and rev-
eled in an era when "cartoonists were working for their
peers without the profit motive being the central motor
to keep it all moving. As a result, comics were investi-
gations in the same way that serious literature and
serious painting might be."
Two factors set Mr. Spiegelman apart from the crowd:
1) He is as adept verbally as he is artistically.
And 2) His patrimony: The Holocaust.
As early as 1972, he put into comics form one Shoah-
related legacy: The suicide of his mother, four years
earlier. About the same time, he started experimenting
with portraying what became the Maus story in comic
book form. As in later versions, the predators were cats
and their prey were mice, but Mr. Spiegelman "kind of
universalized the story. There were no direct references
to Jews. Only when I took it on as a longer book did I

of verbal language combined with a series of simplified
images. We think with simple units of meanings
juxtaposed to make complex thoughts, which is why
comics are a medium that moves toward that process,
and why people remember what they see in comics very
vividly."
Comics may be vivid but they are not purgative. Four
years after finishing his Maus books, Mr. Spiegelman
still is plagued by the demons of the Holocaust. He
probably always will be. And he didn't expect Maus to
exorcise them.
"It's not like I'm disappointed," he said. "I needed to
apply myself to understanding the memory of whatever
happened. Maus allowed for that. I never expected it
to be cathartic. It's a confusion to think that art is."
His gallery's co-director concurred. "Every artist wants
to get the art out of him and convey it to the world," said
Hildegard Bachert. "What the psychological results were
to Art of doing Maus are really not our concern, much
as we are interested in him as a person. But it is the art
that will survive."
Given the admitted social irrelevance of Mr. Spiegel-
man's latest book, Ms. Bachert was asked to be so pre-
sumptuous as to state what she would like him to do
next. Quite firmly, she answered, "I would not answer
that question. It intrudes into an artist's work.... The