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Spiegelman family home
“Yes, life always takes the side of life, and somehow the victims are blamed. But it wasn’t the best people who survived, nor did the best ones die.”
Vladek Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman, figure of the underground comics
Born in Stockholm in 1948, Art Spiegelman attended the High School of Art and Design at Binghamton University in New York State. The American author quickly destined himself to tell stories in comics. He created the fanzine Blasé and with Bill Griffith, he published the comic Arcade in 1975 in which Justin Green and Robert Crumb appear. He is one of the leaders of the American underground comic strip. He illustrated the famous trading cards Les crados and launched the magazine Raw with his wife Françoise Mouly in 1980.
But what shook up the world of 9th art was the publication of Maus, the story of his father deported to a camp during the Second World War.
Maus, a punchy album
In 1980, Art Spiegelman decided to tell the story of his father, Vladek, a Polish Jew imprisoned in a concentration camp. The author tells two intertwined stories, namely that of her father’s captivity and that of the conflicting relationship between them. One takes place in the 1930s-1940s, the other some 40 years later.
To represent the characters of Maus, Art Spiegelman uses the process of zoomorphism, where animals behave like humans, in the vein of Walt Disney’s stories or Edmond-François Calvo with The Beast is Dead. His smoky black and white line is nevertheless quite far from the representations of the two predecessors of the American.
He represents the Germans as cats, the Americans as dogs and the Poles as pigs. As for the Jews, they take on the features of mice. Thus the cats savagely put on the mice. Maus, mouse in German, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. It is to date, the only comic book to have received this prestigious award.
From Rego Park to Auschwitz
Art Spiegelman always knew that his parents had been deported to death camps. His mother Anja in Birkenau and his father in Auschwitz, renamed Mauschwitz in the graphic novel. When he was younger, Vladek did not like to talk about this painful period, and his mother never really got over it and committed suicide in 1968.
After living in Stockholm, the Spiegelman family moved to the United States. It is at 63-12 Carlton Street in Rego Park that Vladek and his new wife Mala settle in and Art interviews his father for the purposes of his comic book. If the family house is recognizable today, its facade has been modified a few years ago.
The family home and the metro station, places rich in emotion
In addition to the family home of Vladek and Mala, Maus tells the story of the author’s father’s discovery of four pages drawn in 1972 about his mother’s suicide. Like the comic book writer leaving a mental hospital, the narrator stages himself in striped pajamas resembling the uniforms of prisoners in the camps in front of the entrance to the Rego Park subway station.
A true masterpiece of world comics, Maus holds a special place in historical research. It is the subject of academic work in psychology, language arts and social studies.
Maus is composed of 292 pages. The story is written on some 1,500 squares, all in black and white.
63-12 Carlton St
At 63-12 Carlton in Rego Park, Queens, New York, there is an important 9th art pavilion.
It was at 63-12 Carlton that Vladek and Mala Spiegelman, the parents of Art the American comic book artist, lived.
It was in this house that the artist interviewed his father in order to obtain material for his masterpiece, Maus, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
The house has two floors and two bedrooms and was built in the 1950s.
The Fantrippers Buying Board
The Complete Maus
Discover the story of Maus with this complete reissue of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work.
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By Damien Canteau
Passionné par l'Histoire, les animés, les Arts et la bande dessinée en particulier, Damien est le rédacteur en chef du site spécialisé dans le 9e art, Comixtrip.