METAMAUS

Having won the first-ever Pulitzer bestowed upon a work of comics, Art Spiegelman hasn’t been able to escape his opus. Any time his name is mentioned, the prize-winning Maus is appended to it; or vice versa. To some extent, he is reaping what he sowed: whenever he drew himself in the post-Maus years, he gave his self-caricature a mouse head. And now, with the publication of MetaMaus, he adds fresh altitude to the pedestal he claims to resent having been placed upon.

“I’m blessed and cursed by this thing I made that obviously looms large for me and for others,” he told David L. Ulin at the Los Angeles Times. “The result is that I can’t do this thing that seems quite easy, which is: ‘That’s that, and now I’m working on a new thing.’”

MetaMaus, which digs deep into Maus’s creation, collecting interviews and sketches that deconstruct his defining work, proves his point with its very existence. And Spiegelman knows it: “If you can’t outrun it,” he said, “just stare the damned beast down.”