Drawing from memory

Art Spiegelman is paging through his new book. It's like looking in a funhouse mirror with Spiegelman popping out of cartoon panels everywhere.

On the first page is the celebrated creator of Maus as a Mad magazine-loving little boy.

“‘What Me Worry?' Right, mommy?'' he says, as his mother, a Holocaust survivor, gazes through a window into the darkness outside.

“Her haunted self. My sunshiny American new self,'' Spiegelman says now.

Here he is again as a hip young underground cartoonist, yelling at his girlfriend.

“Stop screaming at me all the time — I didn't do anything!'' she protests. Pow! He is bonked in the head by a cartoon brick straight out of Krazy Kat, along with a clichéd but devastating Freudian insight: “I-I'm not mad at Michelle ... I-I'm furious with ... my mother!''

She killed herself in 1968, leaving no note. The convict-striped Spiegelman who shows up to tell that story has nothing remotely sunshiny about him.

Many a character

Now here comes a much older, bearded Spiegelman, clutching a large-format book called Breakdowns.

He's being shadowed by a tiny, trench coat-wearing private detective.

“I tailed the little squirt as he got lost in the labyrinths of his past,'' the detective says.

“He kept ducking from one memory to another, trying to locate the moments that shaped him. The smell of his self-absorption made me gag.''

Talk about life imitating art: Breakdowns is also the title of the book the real, bearded cartoonist is looking at right now.

But they're not the same.

The book shown in the cartoon is a collection of Spiegelman's early work published in 1978. It went quickly out of print and stayed there for three decades before Pantheon brought it back as Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@*!

Simply reissuing his old work, however, would have been impossible for Spiegelman, not one given to leaving the past's labyrinths unexamined.

The new version includes a prose afterword. (“I envy the wild-eyed, ink-swilling young artist who made the strips gathered in Breakdowns 30 years ago,'' it begins.)

And it features an introduction, in cartoon form, that combines aesthetic argument with an outpouring of fresh autobiographical material.

The introduction is more than half as long as the original work. It took Spiegelman two years.

“I think of this as my most personal book,'' he says. “What makes it personal is that it's about how I think rather than what I'm thinking about.''

What Spiegelman the cartoonist wants to show us is what it's like “to think between words and pictures, and have the feelings come out someplace between the two''.

Spiegelman works in a spacious, light-filled studio in SoHo, New York. “The house that Maus built.''

Art's home

There's a wall of books that “looks like a scholarly library but it's all art and comics''.

In separate corners are a bed and a small kitchen: “I used to have a studio that looked more like an office but I never went to it.

I would work on my bed, because I hated feeling like a grown-up.''

In the middle of the room are twinned 19th- and 21st-century workspaces: an old-style drawing table and a computer right next to it.

Spiegelman points to a strip in which a phone call interrupts a family viewing of The Dick Van Dyke Show, bringing terrible news.

He chose to evoke potent memory in a greeting-card-friendly 1950s style to highlight the divide between sitcom reality and the “real reality''.

Once again, he's thinking between words and pictures. And it's there that an alert future biographer will find the richest material.