I had my first drawing published in 1961, when I was thirteen. I had taken a sheaf of cartoons to a small weekly paper in Queens, looking for a gig. Instead, they ran a small feature about me, accompanied by my drawing of Frankenstein, under the humiliating headline, "Budding Artist Wants Attention!"
In high school I started making strange, surreal, and decidedly uncommercial comics between homework assignments. In 1965, I took some of these to the just launched EAST VILLAGE OTHER, one of the first of the underground weekly papers that helped define what we now call the Sixties.
Woody Gelman was my mentor back in New York, giving me a summer job as an idea man at Topps Chewing Gum, Inc. as soon as I turned eighteen, a position that ended up lasting twenty years and helped subsidize my "career" as an underground cartoonist.
I envy the wild-eyed, ink-swilling young artist who made the strips gathered in BREAKDOWNS thirty years ago. He was on fire, alienated and ignored, but arrogantly certain that his book would be a central artifact in the history of Modernism.t
On the one hand I'm very grateful for the reception MAUS has received in the world. It makes me feel like I've made something that might outlive me, which is always nice for an artist. On the other hand, yes, it's absolutely cast a shadow, sometimes metamorphosed as a giant mouse chasing me.
I've lived, still do, about eight or 10 blocks above ground zero, and as I would walk from my home to my studio, which was two blocks further north, I'd have to keep turning around to make sure the towers still weren't there, and that led to this phantom limb cover of the black on black.
