I found a long (5 part) interview with Art Spiegelman online. Below is what he said about "Prisoner on the Hell Planet"…
"The year before, I’d worked on the three-page “Maus” comic that owed more to traditional comics exposition techniques, let’s say, but the subject matter had already moved me toward something more serious and on some level autobiographical, as inspired by Justin Green [of the seminal “Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary”]. And my interest in the history and aesthetics of comics was already kind of full blown, so finding out how to harness and pull all these things together was already in progress when I sort of remembered the oddly repressed memory of my mother’s suicide four years before and it made me stop everything else I was doing to give that a shape."
I found it interesting that Spiegelman had already written the three page comic version of Maus before he had written "Prisoner on the Hell Planet". I also thought it was a bit strange that he said he wanted to write "something more serious", suggesting he didn't think of Maus as a serious comic.
SOURCE: http://www.printmag.com/Article/Art_Spiegelman_Part3 (interview between Hillary Chute and Art Spiegelman)
From "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," it is clear that Spiegelman experienced a plethora of wretchedness surrounding the suicide of his mother. I think that at the time "Maus" was simply a comic where people were represented by animals, and the story had to do with the holocaust. At this time in Spiegelman's life the emotions he was feeling needed some release, some catharsis, and he felt that that was more pressing than a story about mice in the holocaust. This is especially true because at that time he hadn't started interviewing Vladek about his experiences. When one has a real witness the story becomes much more serious, more defined, and more real. I think that Maus became more serious as the experiences of his father bled out in their talks.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that Spiegelman may have exactly considered the "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" more "serious" in terms of subject matter, but perhaps more in the way that he expresses the emotions. "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" is much more graphic and filled with constant pictures of horror and almost constructed as if it were done in a moment of insanity. While the drawings in MAUS are also quite horrific themselves, the emotion conveyed in "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" almost seems to be much more raw, less edited and perfected than those found in MAUS. I also think that a reason why Spiegelman may have considered "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" a bit more "serious" is because there are absolutely no breaks from the horror. The scenes are all set within the time of occurrence and there is rarely an escape from this constant sorrow, confusion, and pain. On the contrary, MAUS is filled with moments of laughter when Spiegelman brings Vladek out from his past into the present to blame Art for spilling ash onto the carpet or to tip over his pill bottles, in order to relieve the readers from the intense emotional impact of his story.
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