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This chapter includes a 1990 highly critical review of MoMA’s High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture in cartoon format (image) by Art Spiegelman. This chapter discusses Roy Lichtenstein as “dead” art, excluded artists and genres, high ticket prices, Krazy Kat, and overall conceptual issues. Spiegelman explains: “They made myopic choices not daring the risks that come with a risky topic.”

The coda concludes the book's analysis of the way in which particular texts become apocalyptically legible or manifest. It does so by taking account of Spiegelman's self-reflexive meditation on the ethical relation between Maus' literary reception and the dead bodies of the Holocaust that haunt his text. The coda proceeds to compare the fate of two sets of numbers tattooed onto the arms of Anja and Vladek upon their internment in the concentration camp. While Anja later commits suicide by slashing her wrists, thereby fulfilling a fate already inscribed by her number, Vladek is given life by the priest's prognosticatory interpretation of his number. The book concludes by utilizing Benjamin's concept of the “now of legibility” to read the priest's messianic moment of interpretation as a fragile moment of resistance against the law of apocalyptic incorporation.

This is a brief interstitial introduction by art historian Kim A. Munson explaining the importance of and interaction between two blockbuster exhibitions featuring comics, High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture (MoMA, 1990) and Masters of American Comics (Hammer & Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2005). This chapter discusses The Comic Art Show (Whitney, 1983), Jonah Kinigstein’s satirical cartoons about the NY art world, and the critical and public dialogue surrounding both High and Low and Masters, which has shaped many of the comics exhibitions that followed. This chapter tracks the team of comics advocates that organized The Comic Art Show (John Carlin, Art Spiegelman, Brian Walker, and Ann Philbin), their reactions to High and Low and the production of Masters of American Comics in response.

This chapter demonstrates how one of the most striking features of Art Spiegelman's Maus are the characters' cartoon animal forms: Nazis are cats, Jews are mice, Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs, Brits are fish, the French are frogs, and Swedes are deer. However, his purpose was not to sanitize or “banalize” the Holocaust. Rather, the implementation of the animal forms serves as a shockingly evocative device that attests to the power of graphic novels as a means of persuasive communication and artistic expression. The chapter shows how a people's “becoming animal” is not something that degrades them, but is rather an instance of their having admirable skills at survival in trying circumstances.

This chapter contains an in-depth exploration of the issues surrounding comics and museums written by cultural journalist Scott Timberg for the Los Angeles Times in 2005 during the opening of the Masters of American Comics exhibition at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This chapter includes interviews with Ann Philbin, Art Spiegelman, John Carlin, and Brian Walker about the organization of the show. This chapter discusses the valuation of comic art versus fine art, the disillusionment some cartoonists feel about art school and contemporary fine art, and opinions on the future of comic art shows from curators at other museums.

This is a brief interstitial introduction by art historian Kim A. Munson exploring a wide ranging of exhibitions focused on work by individual artists following the “lone genius” concept utilized in the influential 2005 show Masters of American Comics. This chapter discusses the history of blockbuster exhibits like the Mona Lisa’s US visit (1963) and King Tut (1977), retrospectives of elder statesmen (Kirby, Herriman, Goldberg, Eisner), increased valuation of comic art, and narrative in exhibitions with Gary Panter, Art Spiegelman, R. Crumb, and Carol Tyler. Images: exhibition Goldberg, Herriman, Eisner.

Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List, Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale are all discussed in this chapter in relation to the Shoah. It begins with the intended presumption that all these works bear witness in an honorable and honest way to the Shoah, or at least seek to give inheritance to the facts about it to readers. The chapter performs a “rhetorical reading” on the texts, studying the way this sort of reading operates its performative magic of testifying to the Holocaust. The question of community is also looked at with regards to these works. These works, however, are subject to the double obstacle, a complex “aporia”: the facts of the Holocaust might be inherently unthinkable and unspeakable by any means of representation and “aestheticizing” the Holocaust creates suspicion in that the more successful a novel, the further it may be from the actual experience of the Holocaust.

This chapter undertakes close readings of Kafka’s first and last published animal narratives, The Metamorphosis and “Josephine the Singer.” It focuses upon the different strategies by which Kafka rendered any species determination of the stories’ protagonists, Gregor Samsa and Josephine (as well as her people), indefinite and how he thereby confronted his prospective readers with the constructedness of both human/animal difference and species essentialism. These works are then seen as interventions, whether effectively or not, against an apparatus that these two constructs conditioned, an apparatus that helped naturalize both Gentile/Jew difference and the violent means sustaining it: the identification of the Jew-Animal. It situates these stories over and against historical and literary associations of Jews with vermin (Ungeziefer) and mice as well as in relation to Kafka’s own encounters with such creatures recorded in his letters and in his posthumously published story “The Burrow.” The chapter also includes a discussion of how at the opening of Maus II Art Spiegelman subverted possible essentialist identification of Jews with mice by his readers.

Art Spiegelman places transgenerational trauma at the center of his autobiographical comics Maus, revealing how he attempts to understand his parents’ Holocaust experiences and to comprehend the effects of that legacy that has been passed on to him. He depicts the challenges of extracting a coherent story from his father and shaping it into his book, of attempting to comprehend the haunting absence left by his mother’s suicide and the destruction of her journals, and of trying to represent what has been deemed “unrepresentable.” This chapter presents a close reading of Maus, emphasizing Spiegelman’s cinematic style, use of telling detail, mastery of moving between past and present, use of text as image, strategic choices about when to reproduce photographs and when to draw them, and his multiple conclusions that emphasize the impossibility of closure.

The final chapter discusses the end of McCay's career, his animated films and editorial work. It explores McCay's lasting influence, on cartoonists from Frank King and Crockett Johnson to Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware. McCay's impact on children's literature is also described, as can be seen in the work of Maurice Sendak, William Joyce and David Wiesner,

This chapter considers Lanzmann’s film Shoah and Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus in light of the epistemology of testimony. Two epistemic dimensions are involved: (a) propositional knowledge, conveyed by reports from speaker to listener; and (b) expressive knowledge, which under proper circumstances elicits appropriate responsiveness from the listener. The justification of testimonial knowledge is developed by considering work by Wittgenstein and Richard Moran. Shoah and Maus exhibit contrasting but complementary asymmetries in their aesthetic presentations of testimonies: Shoah eschews all historical illustration of the narratives (propositional knowledge) being recounted by the witnesses, but does focus, at times invasively, on the faces of the witnesses as they recount their narratives. By contrast, Maus eschews the portrayal of human faces (instead they are imaged as various kinds of animals) while illustrating the content of the eyewitness’s testimony (the story of Spiegelman’s father during the Holocaust). Sartre’s theory of the imaginary, suitably modified in light of subsequent criticisms of it, explicates the witness’s and viewer’s distinctive roles in these works as required by the aesthetic presentation. In this way both artworks, each in its own way, fulfill the dual desiderata of Holocaust artworks.

This chapter examines public and private trauma by focusing on autobiographical representations of the events and emotions surrounding 9/11. It analyzes acts of recovering and explores pain, grief, and mourning by offering a reading of Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir In the Shadow of No Towers. It considers comic art as a space of resistance against oppression and suggests that the terrorist bombing of the Twin Towers brings back the traumatic memory of the Holocaust experienced by Spiegelman’s parents. It also shows how Spiegelman links his traumatic experience and its effect on his artistic sensibility to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Finally, the chapter highlights the relationship between cartoons and politics in Spiegelman’s memoir.

This chapter explores how bearing witness challenges public narratives of unity, triumph, and heroism by focusing on the works of Art Spiegelman, Alissa Torres, and Sungyoon Choi and their representations of 9/11. More specifically, it highlights the connections between history, memory, and trauma in Torres’s American Widow (with illustrations by Sungyoon Choi) and Spiegelman’s graphic memoir In the Shadow of No Towers. It discusses how Spiegelman, Torres, and Sungyoon Choi use the comics medium to capture the specifics of their lived experiences of 9/11. It also shows how American Widow and In the Shadow of No Towers challenge the dominant verbal and visual narratives that arose in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

Chapter 3 focuses on postmodernist responses to 9/11, primarily Art Spiegelman’s short graphic memoir, In the Shadow of No Towers and Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The chapter argues that responses to 9/11, cultural or political, may be placed somewhere on a spectrum between historicism and decontextualisation, that is, respectively, those texts which integrated the events of 9/11 into an ongoing geopolitical historical narrative, and those which saw them, by contrast, as an outrageous and unprecedented limit event. As Chapter 3 maintains, right-wing commentators aided the Bush administration in perpetuating the latter ‘rupture’ view and, as Spiegelman’s text angrily delineates, using the resultant feelings of victimhood as a spur to military action.

The last two decades have witnessed a significant transformation of comic books as far as types and content available are concerned, not to mention their critical reception. This shift can be traced to certain events in the production and distribution of comics, particularly superhero comics. However, the singularly most important phenomenon in the reevaluation of comic books was the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (collected in 1986 and 1991) and the critical response it generated. This chapter examines public and academic discourses on the status and nature of comic books in the wake of Maus. After providing an overview of the development of comics that led to the creation of Maus, it assesses its impact, the changing view of comics in the press, and the burgeoning of academic work on comics art. The chapter then considers the scholarly debate over the periodization of graphic novels such as Maus and comments on the campaign by Fredric Wertham and others in the 1950s against comic books, which they accused of causing juvenile delinquency. Finally, it looks at two museum exhibitions showcasing Maus.

Published in two volumes in 1986 and 1991, Maus is a Holocaust narrative by Art Spiegelman that has precipitated a broad reassessment of the artistic potential of the comic book. Its success has led the American media to realize the potential of comics for intellectual and artistic sophistication like any other art form. Maus has garnered the attention of literary critics and has been the subject of numerous scholarly publications. This chapter examines the canonization of Maus through its inclusion in the anthologies published by W. W. Norton, Inc., such as Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology (1st ed., 1997), The Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature (1st ed., 2001), and The Norton Anthology of American Literature (7th ed., 2007). It also considers the book’s affinities with postmodern fiction and the literary criticism it has generated with regard to its representation of the Holocaust, its treatment of gender, and its use of the beast allegory. Finally, the chapter looks at the underlying racism of such allegories as understood by Spiegelman in relation to American cartoons.

This chapter argues that the 9/11 terrorist attacks must be viewed not as a “traumatic” event, but as a violation of everyday life that was quickly co-opted into a cynical project to depict the attacks as a nationalist landmark. Drawing on Art Spiegelman’s use of irony in his 2004 serial comics In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), it highlights the need to rethink post-9/11 trauma, politics, and popular culture. It discusses Spiegelman’s contention that his everyday experiences of fragmentation displace any feelings of retreat, complacency, or fear, resulting in an uncritical acceptance of nationalism and, eventually, unjust war.