Why am I passionate about this?
I had been an exhibiting painter and an editorial cartoonist for years, but never a graphic book artist. Not until A Revolution in Three Acts. I was fortunate to have great guidance: my buddy David Hajdu (Positively Fourth Street, Lush Life, The Ten Cent Plague) wrote the words, did the research, and created the blueprint of every page and panel. My job was to lock myself up in my studio and draw, draw, draw. I think David and I did justice to three amazing figures of the American stage who dealt with the shifting societal forces of race, femininity, and gender: Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge.
John's book list on merging art with personal history
Why did John love this book?
This is the backstory of Spiegelman’s two-volume masterpiece.
What was the impetus for MAUS? How did comic creatures find their way into a Holocaust narrative? What were the reactions to such a unique merging of cartoons and historical horror? How has Spiegelman dealt with the book’s tremendous reception?
The book answers these questions with many interviews, photos, explanations, and reflections. Even agent and publisher rejection letters are included.
1 author picked MetaMaus as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER • Visually and emotionally rich, MetaMaus is as groundbreaking as the masterpiece whose creation it reveals.
In the pages of MetaMaus, Art Spiegelman re-enters the Pulitzer prize–winning Maus, the modern classic that has altered how we see literature, comics, and the Holocaust ever since it was first published twenty-five years ago.
He probes the questions that Maus most often evokes—Why the Holocaust? Why mice? Why comics?—and gives us a new and essential work about the creative process.
Compelling and intimate, MetaMaus is poised to become a classic in its own right.