Art Spiegelman discusses the enduring legacy of Maus, his classic graphic biography, after the book’s recent banning by a school board in Tennessee and upon the publication of Maus Now, Hillary Chute’s new collection of writing from contemporary authors exploring the work’s radical achievement.
“In Maus, Spiegelman not only modeled definitively that in fact comics could be remarkably sophisticated, literate and subtle—but he also blew open about a thousand other cliches and pieties about art and representation, particularly in the expression of the darkest aspects of human history,” writes Chute in the book’s introduction.