Spider-Man by Steve Ditko with Stan Lee (No. 35)

Amazing Fantasy #15 (alternate cover, 1962)

The Amazing Spider-Man #1-38, Annual #1-2 (1963-66)

by Steve Ditko (with Stan Lee)

REVIEW BY KENT WORCESTER:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

The early Spider-Man comics offered a punch-drunk blend of domestic soap opera, workplace comedy, futuristic technology and superhero fisticuffs. Stan Lee was in his element in writing about the tightly-wound teen science whiz who stumbles his way into the Marvel Universe. Steve Ditko generated a storehouse of revelatory images - from the playful dance of Spidey's webbing to faces of hard-nosed criminal underlings. Today, the Spider-Man franchise has become a life support system for some of the most annoying compulsions of the comics industry. But that is no reason for turning our backs on what is surely one of the creative highlights of the Silver Age.

One way of approaching these comics is through the inexpensive black-and-white editions, which bring out Ditko's brooding faces, his euphoric bodies, and his increasingly bold but always controlled lines. Admittedly, these editions obscure the carnival aspect of the original 12-cent comics. But their illusion of transparency calls attention to the visual grammar that structures Spider-Man's movements as he uncoils across a room filled with dangerous men. They also lend an appealing intimacy to Lee's intricate secondary story arcs and his justly famous romance courtship scenes.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the whole enterprise is that Ditko's maturing artistic aspirations and Lee's preference for light melodrama managed to achieve some sort of ecstatic transcendence on the printed page. While their fundamental sensibilities may have been at odds they were both energised by the lesson that Spider-Man embodied - that "with great power comes great responsibility". No doubt Marvel's corporate owners kept this in mind as they cleaved mainstream comics into a thousand pieces.

FURTHER READING:

Steve Ditko 1927-2018 - The Comics Journal

In Search of Steve Ditko (BBC, 2007)

Ditko Comics Weblog

Ditko Shrugged by David Currie (Hermes Press, 2020)
Cartoonist Kayfabe: Ditko Unleashed

The Fantastic Four by Jack Kirby with Stan Lee (No. 30)

The Fantastic Four #1–102, 108, Annual #1-6 (1961-71)

by Jack Kirby (with Stan Lee)

REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Starting with the fourth issue, it build itself as "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine!" and Fantastic Four was able to deliver this promise in a way no other Silver Age comics could. A great deal has been made of how Marvel characters were more popular than those at their "Distinguished Competition" at the time because Marvel heroes were "flawed" and had "everyday" problems. But these were still superhero comics and we still need to see them doing superheroic stuff. It was the balance between the outlandish and the human which made the FF stand out, the rhythms of storytelling which allowed characterisation to blossom in the midst of world-shaking chaos. Not only were the foundations of the Marvel Universe laid down in these pages - Doctor Doom, the return of the Sub-Mariner, the Black Panther, the Watcher, the Silver Surfer, the Inhumans - this bounty of four-colour imagination was balanced by a great deal of humour, empathy and wonder. The Thing in a Beatles wig, his persecution at the hands of both the hot-headed Torch and the Yancy Street Gang, the Invisible Woman's frustration at Mister Fantastic's absent-minded professor tendencies, Willie Lumpkin's bid for membership... These small touches were what gave the series heart.

And the heart was pumping for the most muscular of Sliver Age spectacles: namely, the visual elan Kirby brought to the series. Silver Age Marvel was indisputably Kirby's finest moment, and the FF was his showcase. Kirby's art grew progressively more polished until it reached the solid, blocky dynamism that remains the standard for superhero comics today. The generosity of Kirby's storytelling, the detail brought to every panel, to every stance, to every fight scene, fleshed out a world he dared us to believe in. Even the photo-collages, quaint as they now look, pushed the limits of what "cosmic" meant for the fanboy imagination.

In short, the versatility of the series - especially within the constraints of a relatively obvious genre - was remarkable. It could be comic on one page and homespun on the next. The coming of Galactus was earth-shattering, but the marriage of Reed Richards and Sue Storm was equally momentous. Few have come even close to re-capturing what Kirby and Lee did on Fantastic Four - and to be honest, the formula hasn't always remained in favour over the years. But this remains the classic model, the superhero comic that all others should be measured against.

FURTHER READING:
Interview: The Comics Journal #134 (Feb 1990)

Jack Kirby Museum

The Jack Kirby Collector

Rubber Blanket Short Stories by David Mazzucchelli (No. 72)

Rubber Blanket #1-3 (1991-1993)

by David Mazzucchelli

REVIEW BY GIL ROTH:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! from The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

David Mazzucchelli made a rather astonishing transition from the 1980s to the 90s. After establishing his name on such highly regarded superhero comics as Daredevil and Batman: Year One, he fell off the comics radar screen for a few years. Rumours may not have abounded, but there was definitely a curiosity as to how he would follow up those works. I don't know if anyone was prepared for Rubber Blanket, the oversized anthology book that Mazzucchelli first published in 1991.

Gone were all the men in tights, as well as the action sequences that Mazzucchelli rendered in his fluid, cinematic style. Instead, he took his art and his storytelling further into expressionism, crafting several memorable stories that stand out even in this decade of impressive talent. When we read Blind Date or Near Miss in the context of Mazzucchelli's career to date, it's no wonder Rob Liefeld's head blew off (or so the anecdote goes) after reading an issue of the series. It's hard to think of another cartoonist who had ignored so much mainstream promise (purportedly an offer to take over drawing the X-Men) in order to pursue his art this doggedly.

This isn't to say that Mazzucchelli entirely abandoned the superhero mythos. His most praised story from Rubber Blanket, Big Man, is essentially a very well-crafted Incredible Hulk story. His best work in Rubber Blanket is actually #2's Discovering America, a fantastic testament to the uprootedness of our times. The story, about a love-struck building custodian and his compulsion to graphically represent the changing world of the early 1990s, perfectly weds Mazzucchelli's think line, his ear for dialogue, his aforementioned cinematic eye. He even manages a great payoff, which is a rara avis for cartoonists nowadays. With this story leading a pack of inventive, visually challenging works, Mazzucchelli's stories easily stand among the top 100 of our age.

FURTHER READING:

Cartoonist Kayfabe: Rubber Blanket #3

Palmer's Picks: Mazzucchelli's Born Again

Palestine by Joe Sacco (No. 27)

Palestine (1993-1995)

by Joe Sacco

REVIEW BY CHRIS BRAYSHAW:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century!, The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Joe Sacco began Palestine following his first trips to the Middle East in the early 1990s, but his series' real success lies in how seamlessly it extends a long tradition of pictorial journalism rooted in the work of graphic artists like William Hogarth (Beer Street and Gin Lane) and Francisco Goya (The Disasters of War). In these works, like Sacco's own, a blackly satirical exegesis of history is inescapable from the artist's own position as a witness. Consequently, Palestine is not only journalism, but autobiography as well, and some of the series finer moments come courtesy of Sacco's cartoon persona, whose journalistic project almost inevitably distances him from the Palestinians and Israelis he meets. Still, for all his (grossly exaggerated) cowardice, bad faith, and lusting after European hostel girls, you wind up liking Sacco, and the single-mindedness with which he pursues his project, even when it exposes him to the withering contempt of his hosts.

Sacco draws like a dream, and Palestine's other great strength is the way its narrative flow smoothly shifts gears with Sacco's storyline. Straight forward six panel grids abruptly flower into double-page spreads of rundown townships, or collapse into hundreds of tiny panels chronicling a brutal interrogation in a solitary cell. Sacco's a great caricaturist, and Palestine's accomplished figure drawing recalls the expressionistic excess of artists like Otto Dix, George Grosz and Ralph Steadman.

Sacco's literary and artistic talents are, perhaps, most perfectly realised in the Zero Zero short, Christmas With Karadzic, but compared to anything else in the current marketplace, Palestine sets a standard for comics journalism almost impossible to supersede. 

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:
In Joe Sacco's Palestine, the autobiographical comic book reaches beyond everyday trivia to embrace the travel documentary. Utilizing a masterful array of visual devices and employing consummate draftsmanship, Sacco details life in the Occupied Territories with sensitivity, insight, and a fine eye for moral ambiguities. Highly recommended.

REVIEW BY EDDIE CAMPBELL:
The trouble with first hand personal-account comics is that the authors generally do not go to much trouble to make their lives interesting enough. Enter Joe Sacco, to whom the above does not apply. Some mighty serious journalism going on here.

READ THIS COMIC:

Palestine is available from Fantagraphics Books and finer comic shops near you.

FURTHER READING:
Eye Witness in Gaza (The Guardian, 2003)

Lost Comics: Seth

"Once upon a time, somebody said that only children read stories with pictures drawn against them..."
From a Johnnie Walker advertisement feature (The New Yorker, 29 November 2004)
art by Seth

Seth is the cartoonist behind the comic book series Palookaville published by Drawn & Quarterly. He lives in Guelph, Ontario, with his wife Tania and their two cats in an old house he has named Inkwell's End.

Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work!!

Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work!!

or Some Interesting Ways To Get Variety In To Those Boring Panels
Where Some Dumb Writer Has A Bunch Of Lame Characters

 Sitting Around And Talking For Page After Page!
(Click image to enlarge!)

LARRY HAMA:
(from Joel Johnson's Blog, 2006)
I worked for Wally Wood as his assistant in the early '70s, mostly on the Sally Forth and Cannon strips he did for the Overseas Weekly. I lettered the strips, ruled borders, swipe-o-graphed reference, penciled backgrounds and did all the other regular stuff as well as alternating with Woody on scripting Cannon and Sally Forth.

The "22 Panels" never existed as a collected single piece during Woody's lifetime. Another ex-Wood assistant, Paul Kirchner had saved three Xeroxed sheets of the panels that would comprise the compilation. I don’t believe that Woody put the examples together as a teaching aid for his assistants, but rather as a reminder to himself. He was always trying to kick himself to put less labor into the work! He had a framed motto on the wall: 

"Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up." 

He hung the sheets with the panels on the wall of his studio to constantly remind himself to stop what he called "noodling". 

When I was starting out as an editor at Marvel, I found myself in the position of having to coach fledgling artists on the basics of visual storytelling, and it occurred to me that the reminder sheets Woody made would help in that regard. but three eight-by-ten pieces of paper were a bit unwieldy, so I had Robby Carosella, the Marvel photostat guy at the time, make me re-sized copies of all the panels so I could fit them all on one sheet. I over-compensated for the half-inch on the height (letter paper is actually 8 1/2 by 11) so the main body of images once pasted up came a little short. I compensated for that by hand lettering the title.

Larry Hama is a comics artist and writer best known for his work on G.I Joe.

FURTHER READING:
Dave Sim discusses the '22 Panels That Always Work'

Little Nemo In Slumberland by Winsor McCay (No. 5)

Little Nemo In Slumberland (1905-1911, 1914, 1924-1927)

by Winsor McCay

REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century!, The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Ancient culture, uncovering impressive remains of still more ancient cultures, often attributed to their predecessors a superhuman stature. Finding the great walls and gates made of stone blocks they no longer possessed the technology to move, descendants presumed ancestors to be a race of giants or cyclops whose achievements were inconceivable through merely human means.

Little Nemo In Slumberland appears to us today as an expansive, extravagant, and glorious monument to imaginative vision and artistic mastery. For all the strip's direct and accessible beauty, for all its immediate appeal, it seems faintly exotic, the product of some preternatural insight and ability. It practically dares us to consider it as the work of mortal hands - let alone a single pair - in a commercial industry. Who thought up these wonderful things? How could they have possibly have been committed to paper, Sunday after Sunday?

How do we explain the intuitive ingenuity, the calculated riot of the strip's evolving excitement? Where is the precedent for such lush and dazzling mass-produced fantasies? Who had the trained and prolonged concentration sufficient to exactingly portray the wild variety of objects and scenes... or the audacity to indelibly entwine the most mundane and the most utterly preposterous? How can we count for the sheer output of images? What about the degree of detail rendered, the magnificent colouration, the adeptness of line, the thrilling ornamentation, the design elements both subtle and flamboyant, the grand architectural settings, the fluid experiments in perspective and animation, the sustained visual fireworks? Today, to us, the care, scope, bravado, and devotion displayed in Little Nemo seem the hallmarks of a lost era.

However gifted, Winsor McCay can be seen as human as the rest of us, thanks in part to the valuable Canemaker biography. McCay was a pioneer in animated cartooning and enjoyed success in a stage act that featured his drawing skills. He originated a number of strips, such as Little Sammy Sneeze and Hungry Henrietta, with strong formulaic and thematic hooks. Another Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend feature spectacularly conceived and rendered nightmares that invariably end with awakening.

While precursors, these earlier strips could hardly have prepared readers for the untethered wonder and grand scale of Little Nemo. Here McCay's ambition, training, natural talent and love of drawing coalesced in the full-page colour funnies feature that unfurled from 1905 to 1911 (with a reincarnation as In The Land Of Wonderful Dreams extending through 1914 and a revival from 1924 to 1927). His earlier employment - as caricaturist, editorial cartoonist, illustrator, graphic reporter, and poster maker for the circus and dime museums - was surely instrumental in the punctual forays into a world built upon pageantry, splendour and marvel. McCay's lack of formal artistic training may have additionally contributed the notion that nothing was unthinkable in the furtherance of expression.

Certain images and sequences from Little Nemo, appropriated by all manner of art and commerce, have gained a life of their own during later, hungrier cultures. Once glimpsed, especially at a tender age, fragments become unforgettable - the galloping bed, the roller-coaster stairway bannister, the house gobbling turkey, the dragon carriage, the plausible chaos of Befuddle Hall.

Thanks to the Fantagraphics' luxurious (yet still undersized) reprint series, we can now see just how astonishing McCay's entire run was. Pick a month of instalments, any month, (though earlier would likely more thoroughly amaze than later). September, 1908? It begins with a runaway locomotive, plowing through streets, buildings and forests. Next week it's a carousel whose animals come to life in their circle chase only to end in the menageries' chain reaction collision; this is followed by a home hooked by a ship's anchor, hoisted high, and dropped to earth; then the floor beneath and the background behind the characters undergo a series of mechanical transformational shifts as if they were part of child's puzzle. October begins with Nemo's bath becoming a pond, then a swamp infested with wildlife, and finally open water where he dodges the prows and wakes of ocean-going ships only to reach an ice-flow where he's chased by a polar bear. I could go on and on, because McCay went on and on.

One doesn't so much read these strip as drink them in. With all there is to see in each panel of Slumberland, the proper pacing for the strip might well approach one episode per week. Taken too quickly, Little Nemo can prove to be an exhausting read with its incomparable deluge of wonders (to say nothing of those unaccountably crammed word balloons and the thoroughly pedestrian dialogue) Even a glance at one of its timeless pages suggests it remains a strip to ogle and, perhaps, to inform our own dreams.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:

(from Comics For The Holidays, The Comics Journal #270, November 2006)

...for those of us who care to give the very best, there's Winsor McCay's Little Nemo In Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays (Sunday Press, $120). Yeah It's pricey, but the work is priceless, and the book is actually not overpriced. The production is impeccable. Collecting the best pages from the best period (1905-1910) of the most visually and structurally ravishing strip ever made, this 16x21-inch, 120-page bundle of joy weighs in at about 10 pounds and is probably the biggest object you can place under a Christmas tree short of plunking the tree down on top of a new Porsche. I'm embarrassed to be gushing - it's not in my nature - but this is one of the few books I could not resist providing a blurb for in the past few years. (Despite repeated injunctions from my agent that I shouldn't since it breeds exponentially more blurb requests. Every blurb is a long haiku that takes too much time away from other forms of procrastination.) Anyway, my endorsement read:

This book's a dream. A slumbering giant has stirred and walks among us - its that hot new artist, Winsor McCay. You literally can't imagine what loving production and full broadsheet-sized scale have wrought! A testimonial (please don't confuse this with "hype"): I have every book of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo ever published. I even have a few actual Sunday Pages, but I tell you, it's as if I'd never seen Nemo before! Certainly never read it. (The "writing" in Nemo, even the lettering has been underestimated - it was always hard to squint and absorb it even in so-called "one-sized" reproductions.) Perhaps you THINK you know Nemo - that its easy to extrapolate from what you've seen and go "Uh-huh. I get it. It's bigger." Uh-huh. You DON'T get it - but if towering aesthetic achievement interests you at all, you gotta get it! I mean, it's as if somebody showed you a table-top model of the Chrysler building and said, "It's just like that, only bigger." Or if you saw a refrigerator magnet reproduction of a Van Gogh painting and figured you've seen Van Gogh... I dunno, for an artist as concerned with shifts in scale and meticulous attention to detail as McCay was, this heartbreakingly beautiful book is the reinvention of Winsor McCay - as if he was being published for the first time. Only better.

FURTHER READING:

Sunday Press Books

Read Little Nemo online at GoComics!

John Canemaker's McCay Biography

The Passport by Saul Steinberg (No. 67)

The Passport (1954)

by Saul Steinberg

REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century!, The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Longtime New Yorker institution Saul Steinberg once declared that his illustrations "masqueraded as cartoons". But coming to his work fresh, one would be hard-pressed to figure out which was the real thing and which was the masquerade. Steinberg's body of work is a thrilling argument for the utility and effectiveness of cartoon art. Harold Rosenberg, writing for a Steinberg exhibition at the Whitney in 1978, said the artist's "metamorphosis of the cartoon into a vehicle for meditating on a seemingly limitless range of issues, including the central ones of art - illusion, self and reality - constitutes an expansion of the intellectual resources of flat-surface composition comparable to that of collage".

Steinberg's work is a skilful, encyclopaedic barrage of technique: deft simplification of line, making thematic points by working with several perspectives within one drawing, even using progressive imagery to fashion narratives from a single picture, as in his geographical cartoons. On top of his mastery of comics' formal properties, a lot of Steinberg's work is terribly funny, and he exhibited a playfulness best seen in his utilisation of methods more commonly found in other arts: automatic writing, paste-ups, and the appropriation of other artists' imagery.

The Passport is an excellent single-volume sample of Steinberg's work, one of a series of oversized hardcover books gracing the coffee tables of middle class, mid-century Americans. In addition to everything else laudatory about his work and driving artistic vision, Steinberg had a heck of a line, and one can spend hours visiting and re-visiting his most elaborate illustrations.

AUSTIN ENGLISH (DOMINO BOOKS):

(from Twitter, January 2021)

Looking at TCJ's Top 100 from 1999, the most absolutely insane thing is Steinberg at #67 but Peter Arno at #21. Not sure Arno would crack top 100 today, but I imagine Steinberg would be in top 10.

FURTHER READING:

The Saul Steinberg Foundation

Alec by Eddie Campbell (No. 51)

Alec (1981-2010)

by Eddie Campbell

REVIEW BY ROBERT BOYD:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Eddie Campbell started his curious autobiographical stories about Alec McGarry in 1981 and they continue to the present. He may have been the first cartoonist to illustrate the slacker lifestyle - Alec is an over-educated character working in a dead-end job and spending all his time drinking in pubs. But don't hold that against Campbell. These are great stories, majestic documents of small events. Campbell's unlabored approach to storytelling draws you in. Even when he writes about misery and despair, as in Graffiti Kitchen, there is always a deceptively diary-like feel to the work.

I say deceptive, because the stories have a structure. They exist in service to their characters - Alec, Danny Grey, Penny, Jane, Georgette etc - and these characters are given flesh the same way an oil painter uses glazes. Each new appearance or vignette adds a little more detail to the character until finally a full-fledged personality - complex and irreducible - emerges. The stories, such as they are, are almost invisible in this process. They inevitably describe the arc of a relationship - the rise and fall of Alec's friendships and love affairs with Danny, Penny, Jane and Georgette. But the means of describing these cycles is so discursive that one might not even see the big picture at first.

Campbell's drawing likewise seems exceedingly casual. The early Alec stories have zip-a-tone, so at least the reader knows Campbell went over them twice. But there is probably no artist who has ever used zip-a-tone in such an impressionistic way as Campbell. In Graffiti Kitchen he drops the zip and the work becomes pure handwriting. Each panel reads as if it were dashed off on a notepad as the events described were unfolding. The drawing has an expressive urgency (even though the story has a typically stately pace) that perfectly matches the heightened emotions depicted.

Alec continues to pop up - in the lighthearted Dance of Lifey Death and most recently in a story being serialised in Dee Dee. This is strong work, and will no doubt comfortably sit with the brilliant work Campbell has done before.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:
I like Eddie's stuff because it's Masculist fiction and it demonstrates that you don't have to be published by Virago books in order to have any heart, understanding or human sensitivity. Men feel things too. It just takes them longer. I like it because it doesn't confuse being realistic with being depressing and because it is written by someone who obviously finds being alive an endless source of novelty and conundrum. I like it because it fills me in on what would have happened to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady if they'd traded in the Lincoln for a Ford Transit and moved to Southend-On-Sea. On The Pier as opposed to On The Road.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:
Do you need me to tell you how good Eddie Campbell is? Or that Alec is probably the best book-length comic about art and wine and midlife crises and families and friends and wine and love and art and saying goodbye and terror there is?

READ THIS BOOK:

The collected Alec stories were finally published in one big book in 2010 by Top Shelf Publishing and available from a quality comic shop near you!

FURTHER READING:

Official Site: Eddie Campbell Dammit!

Interview: The Comics Journal #273 (January 2006)
Interview: The Comics Journal #145 (October 1991)

Maus by Art Spiegelman (No. 4)

Maus (Book I, 1986; Book II, 1991)

by Art Spiegelman

REVIEW BY GENE KANNENBURG:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century!, The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

It's almost too easy pick Art Spiegelman's Maus for this list - almost. After all, it won a Pulitzer Prize (1992) and received probably more journalistic and academic attention than any other comics work, or any cartoonist's oeuvre, for that matter. To speak of Maus' importance in American Comics has become cliche. The book's themes - the Holocaust, the generation gap, the more general burdens of the past - brought the book attention, in part, because it so little looked "like a comic book" that reviewers were caught off-guard. It's central metaphor - representing Jews as mice and Nazis as cats - was equally striking; was this an unforgivable breach of decorum or a skilfully wielded narrative and thematic device? Observations such as these prefaced most of the book's initial reviews, and they continue to inform analysis of the book today. In this case, believe the hype: Maus fully deserves the attention and praise it has received.

One of Maus' strengths lies in how (deceptively) easy it is to read. The narrative (or narratives - more on that in a second) comes across almost effortlessly. The stylistically spare but highly expressive drawings accompany text which drives the narrative; there are few wordless panels to be found. Indeed, many people who are intimidated by the comics form itself find remarkably little difficulty in following the story, owing to the book's clear, carefully presented storytelling - a seemingly radical departure from Spiegelman's large body of experimental  "comics about comics". The important observation here, however, is that Spiegelman wields his bag of formal narrative tricks as much as ever, although here in a far more sophisticated, less flashy fashion. It's only with concerted effort that you begin to notice just how Spiegelman has permeated almost every page with innovative layouts, sophisticated temporal transition, and artful panel compositions. In other words, the first time you read Maus, you get caught up in the book's story; on subsequent readings, however, you can get equally caught up in exploring the book's storytelling.

Narratively, the book is structured in a series of temporal layers. At the core lies the story of how Art's parents (his mother, Anja and, particularly, his father, Vladek) survive the Holocaust. Actually, as the book often stresses, it's not really a story of how they survived; pinning blame or reason on a story such as this is almost impossible. Rather, it's a story which explains that they survived and how these experiences continued to affect not only their own lives but the lives of everyone around them, especially their son Art. The second story-layer functions as the "present" in Book 1; in this story, Art reacquaints himself with Vladek (and Vladek's second wife Male, herself a survivor) almost solely for the purposes off recording his father's story in order to create Maus. An in-between state is presented by the inclusion of Spiegelman's Prisoner on the Hell Planet (1973), his memoir of Anja's suicide, rendered in a highly expressionistic style. Maus II's chapter entitled Auschwitz (Time Flies) adds an additional layer, which takes place after the publication of Maus I and presents Spiegelman attempting to deal with the fame which that book has brought him - and the problems such fame presents, both personally and artistically.

It is this combination of times and stories which lends Maus much of its richness and reward. By presenting so many juxtapositions of past and present, Spiegelman can explore questions of witness, guilt, dependance and obligation both verbally and visually. Conversations between Vladek and Artie segue to narrated history and back again, often on the same page; we can see the influence of the past on the present. In Maus II especially, we witness Spiegelman's ambivalence about the book's (and his own) success, from the page layout in Auschwitz (Time Flies) which creates the impression that Art's pipe smoke doubles as exhaust from a crematorium to the back cover illustration, which melds the stripes of Vladek's camp uniform with the book's UPC code. These temporal and thematic balances come about naturally, almost organically as the overall story progresses - a testament to the power of the comics form to present narrative nuance and depth.

Of course, the cat-and-mouse metaphor itself presents abundant food for thought - while it does effectively convey the impression of Nazis as hunters and Jews as prey, might it not also condone the idea that there are indeed separate races of people? But throughout the book Spiegelman acknowledges this tension, exploring his metaphor both through language and visual representations in ways far too numerous to delineate in this brief essay; suffice to say that this animal conceit serves, paradoxically, as a powerful, ever-constant reminder in the book about difficulties of inter-personal relationships.

One of the marks of good literature (in comics or prose or what-have-you) is that work demands and rewards careful re-reading. Maus deserves its acclaim as one of the most significant comics of the century and as an important literary work of distinction.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:

(from a review in Escape #10, 1986)

Since discovering his work in the mid 70's, I have been convinced that Art Spiegelman is perhaps the single most important comic creator working within the field and in my opinion Maus represents his most accomplished work to date... Intensely subjective, it manages to encompass subjects as sensitive and diverse as the holocaust on one hand and the yawning emotional gulf between parents and children on the other, all in a fashion that is at once revealing, moving and innovatory. Maus surely marks one of the high points of the comic medium to date. It is perhaps the first genuine graphic novel in recent times, and as such its significance cannot be overstated. Please read it.

READ THIS BOOK:

Maus is available from all good book stores and your local comics shop. 

FURTHER READING:

Meta Maus by Art Spiegelman (2011)

Art Spiegelman: Conversations (2007)