With numerous museum shows and other professional accolades behind him, Spiegelman, who turns 61 this month, is no longer the young upstart. And soon after, when curator Robert Storr put the Maus drawings in a “Projects” show, Spiegelman was in MoMA after all. With content that was in many ways more radical than its form-using pigs, mice, and other animals as the protagonists, the strip recounted his father’s escape from the Holocaust and subsequent life as an émigré- Maus: A Survivor’s Tale won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. He refocused his energy on Maus, the autobiographical strip he had been publishing in installments in RAW, the influential comics anthology he edited with his wife, Françoise Mouly. I had to somehow become a gallery artist and decide that all I needed was two or three people who understood my work.” Or he could go back to telling stories.

“In making deconstructivist, experimental comics that had to do with the form of comics outside of any context,” he explains, he had abandoned one of the prime missions of the medium-storytelling. The way Spiegelman tells it, his desire to break out of the box-the left-to-right-panel format sacrosanct even in avant-garde cartooning-had led him off track. “Comics that weren’t that easy to read miraculously didn’t find a giant audience,” he recounts drily.

A printing glitch ruined about half the copies, and there was little demand for the others. In this decidedly un-comic-book-like production, he infused his intoxication with collage, Cubism, and other high-art styles into the gritty staccato of his popular-art form. In 1978, when Art Spiegelman was making a name for himself as an experimental cartoonist, he took a bold step: he assembled his short, edgy strips into a high-concept, large-format book called Breakdowns.

Jack and the box art spiegelman