Just Do It

Art Spiegelman

by Joel Tannenbaum

Mon., Feb. 18, 6:30 p.m.; Tue., Feb. 19, 10 a.m., free but reservations required, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, 215-573-9749, writing.upenn.edu/wh

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You've probably read Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus: A Survivor's Tale. Maybe it was assigned to you in high school English class, alongside Eli Wiesel's Night or The Diary of Anne Frank. It might have struck you as odd that you were being given a graphic novel to read by the same teacher who was forcing Tess of the D'Urbervilles on you. Or maybe you thought it was downright weird that you'd been given a text about the Holocaust in which Jews were depicted as mice, Germans as cats, etc. It all seemed very radical in the early 1990s, when Maus won its author a Pulitzer Prize.

All the more radical because Spiegelman had emerged from the deepest, darkest corner of the American comic book underground of the 1960s. Born in 1948 in Stockholm to Holocaust survivors and raised in New York, Spiegelman dropped out of college and had a spectacular nervous breakdown at the mere age of 20 — turning afterward to writing, drawing and editing for periodicals with names like Bizarre Sex and Real Pulp that were mostly sold in head shops. During a period of serious disillusionment with the comics biz, Spiegelman came up with the autobiographical Maus. The book's genius is simply that the narrator's quest to make sense of his screwed-up family forces him, and the reader, to try to make sense of a huge and tragic historical event. As part of the Kelly Writers Fellow Program, Spiegelman will be at Penn on Monday and Tuesday to talk about Maus and his more recent project, In the Shadow of No Towers, a bizarre, collaged response to 9/11.