Man behind Maus down under

CREATOR of the Pulitzer prize-winning 1992 graphic novel Maus, Art Spiegelman, will make his Australian debut at the Sydney Opera House this Saturday in a performance that explores his own work, spanning more than four decades, and the major artists and movements that influenced his craft.

The autobiographical show, which took eight months to create for the Australian debut, is called Wordless – a hybrid of slides and musical performance created with acclaimed Sydney-based jazz composer Phillip Johnston for Sydney’s Graphic Festival.

The prolific New York-based cartoonist is best known for his pioneering, two-volume graphic novel which recounts his Polish parents’ experiences surviving Auschwitz, using mice to represent the Jews and cats as the Nazis.

The work saw Spiegelman revisit traumatic childhood memories and spend hours interviewing his father about his experiences in the Shoah.

Spiegelman said Wordless, which he referred to as a “concert-slash-lecture”, is partly based on his research on the American artist Lynd Ward’s 1920s novels, which used wood engraving as a graphic technique.

In one harrowing strip in Maus, Spiegelman employs the technique to detail the shocking suicide of his mother. “There is this strip about my mother’s suicide that is in a different style as rest of Maus. That was directly affected by the wood-cut novels.

“The visual spectrum that is in that one four-page strip changed me and changed what I thought comics could do. It helped me deal with my mother’s death, which I had blacked out on and couldn’t remember because it was just too much to think about.”

Spiegelman said creating Maus was his way of dealing with the pain he suffered as a second-generation Holocaust survivor. “I tried therapy and I tried comics. Drawing comics is a lot less expensive … it [Maus] gave me permission to reach the deepest recesses of the minds and hearts the way art and literature can.”

TIMNA JACKS

Pulitzer prize-winner Art Spiegelman.