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.
MetaMaus includes a bonus DVD that provides a digitized reference copy of The Complete Maus linked to a deep archive of audio interviews with his survivor father, historical documents, and a wealth of Spiegelman’s private notebooks and sketches.
Compelling and intimate, MetaMaus is poised to become a classic in its own right.
About Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman has been a staff artist and contributing editor at The New Yorker, as well as the cofounder/coeditor of RAW, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics. In addition to Maus—which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and twice nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award—he is the author of Breakdowns and In the Shadow of No Towers. He lives in New York City with his wife, Françoise Mouly . . . and a cat.
Editorial Reviews
“Why the Holocaust? Why mice? Why comics? Spiegelman answers intelligently, articulately, and with a high degree of psychological and aesthetic penetration.” –Booklist, starred review
“As a floor plan for endless exploration, it is the Haus That “Maus” Built…Pick any page and gaze. The windows into these stories about the story are to be found at every turn, filling the space with insightful light.” –Washington Post’s Comic Riffs
“Art Spiegelman has done more than any other writer of the last few decades to change our understanding of the way stories about the Holocaust can be written…MetaMaus is a profound meditation on the meaning of sources and the uses we make of them.” –The New Republic
Reader Review
I received this yesterday and I’ve been reading through many of the essays and other information. This is an important book to read, not only because it provides insights into the creative process of Spiegelman but because it lives up to its title by being an exploration on a larger level of what it means to produce a graphic novel. While this could have been very self-indulgent, it’s only a little bit, and such is almost necessary. Shame, however, about the DVD: not only does it want to run really slowly on my newer Macbook Pro and the interface is rather clumsy at times but also, even more importantly, when I tried to put it back into the front cover it wouldn’t fit! Maybe it’s just my copy, but by having the DVD stored literally in the front cover is a clever but, in the long term, impractical method. Good book so far, but I wish more thought had gone into the design. – S. Koterbay, Amazon.Com Customer Review
After a Quarter-Century, an Author Looks Back at His Holocaust Comic
The New York Times Book Review – October 12, 2011 (Excerpt)
Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” the most unconventional great book yet written about the Holocaust, the one that turned Nazis into cats and Jews into mice and Poles into pigs, turns 25 this year. It was the first comic book to win a Pulitzer Prize, and it changed the way comics — the term seems wrong for “Maus” — are viewed in America. It proved they could be serious art.
“Maus” is not a graphic novel but a work of memoir and history. It tells the story of Mr. Spiegelman’s father in Poland before World War II, in Auschwitz during the war and as an old coot in Rego Park, Queens, after the fighting stopped. Part of Mr. Spiegelman’s accomplishment in “Maus” is that he turned it into a second-generation Holocaust survivor’s account, too. That is, he made himself a character in the book and threaded in his own quizzical modern sensibility. “Maus” doesn’t have a tired or sanctimonious bone in its body.
Mr. Spiegelman’s new book, “MetaMaus,” functions as a kind of artist’s scrapbook, chapbook, photo album and storage trunk. Packed with more extras than a new “Transformers” DVD, it’s a look back at “Maus” and its complicated composition and reception. His publisher calls this shaggily engaging volume, accurately enough, a “vast Maus midrash.”
An extended Q & A with Mr. Spiegelman, a kind of swollen Paris Review interview, fills most of the book’s pages, while arty and inky things pack the margins: draft sketches from “Maus”; personal photographs; family trees; official documents like his mother’s passport and his parents’ arrest records from Auschwitz. [Read the full article...]
The Making of ‘Maus’
The New York Times Book Review – December 2, 2011 (Excerpt)
“Survival is having children even if they hate you,” Art Spiegelman wrote in his notebook in 1985, while still working on his two-volume comics masterpiece, “Maus,” which would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize. Subtitled “A Survivor’s Tale,” “Maus” recreated the horrors of the Holocaust — as experienced by Art’s father, Vladek, and mother, Anja — casting Jews as mice and Germans as cats. But it also explored the difficult relationship between tetchy skinflint Vladek and his resentful son with touching and discomfiting honesty.
The richly rewarding 25th-anniversary volume METAMAUS (Pantheon, $35) reveals just how history has repeated itself for Art Spiegelman. Vladek survived the Holocaust only to have a son with whom he never truly made peace: “My anger against him was so free-floating and easy to access,” Spiegelman explains, that “it was just our leitmotif.” Art survived Vladek but still struggles to come to terms with the legacy of his own creation. “The success of ‘Maus’ called my bluff,” he says ruefully. “O.K., O.K.! So you’re a genius! So now what?!” In the aftermath of his book’s success, he admits, he has mostly been “trying to wriggle out from under my own achievement.” [Read the full article...]
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