MetaMaus

I was first introduced to the magnificent Maus books when I was doing my student teaching at Shorewood High School in 1994-1995. The faculty had selected it to use as a text in an English course there. I was fascinated by the story and the painstaking attention to detail that Art Spiegelman had infused in his masterpiece.  It was such a strange text that included  the meta-narrative of Spiegelman's relationship with his mother and father, an interlude, "Prisoner of Hell Planet" that noted and investigated the effect of his mother's suicide on the author, as well as self-denigrating insights about himself. It is a powerful book and I followed Spiegelman's career since discovering him as he became a presence at The New Yorker. So when I saw that MetaMaus (2011) had been published I knew that I would need to read it. It is a fascinating look at the production of the book, its reception, his family, and Spiegelman as the author/artist. It is a comprehensive look at the writing of a classic. The book itself is an artifact with high quality production design and dozens of high quality drawings, pictures, print reproductions, letters, and other various documents illustrating points that Spielgeman relates to his interviewer Hillary Chute, a professor in the English Department at the University of Chicago. There is an additional hyperlinked DVD with The Complete Maus and an in-depth archive of audio interviews with Spiegelman's father, photos, notebooks, drawings, essays, and other material. I found this useful while reading the book I could search out essays that Spiegelman referred to in his interview, like Larwence Whelscher's essay "Art's Father, Vladek's Son" that was originally published in Rolling Stone and Spiegelman's essay "Looney Tunes, Zionism, and the Jewish Question" from The Village Voice. This is a fascinating and informative companion to Spielgelman's classic Maus.