The Making of MetaMaus

Looking back on Art Spiegelman's Maus, 25 years later.

In the summer of 2008, Art Spiegelman gave a talk at Vancouver’s Centre for Digital Media, where I was about to start my master’s degree. He spoke about comics, the medium that vaulted him into the public spotlight 15 years ago. Spiegelman is arguably the most famous comic artist in the world. He is the author of Maus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning comic about his father’s experiences during the Holocaust. The comic depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, and shows a boy’s struggle to comprehend his dad.

He wrote the book 25 years ago, and this past October released MetaMaus – an exploration and explanation of Maus – in honour of the anniversary. MetaMaus includes an interactive DVD that links to a digital version of the original comic, a rich archive of the materials that went into the making of Maus, and a treasure trove of more Spiegelabilia – most of which has never before been published. I produced the DVD with Art. Here’s how a guy in Vancouver got to work with the grand pooba of commix.

When in Vancouver, Art told Dr. Gerri Sinclair, who was at that time the executive director at the centre, that he had an old CD-ROM application that allowed users to explore the making and archives of Maus. Unfortunately, he said, it doesn’t work with modern computers. Art was in the early stages of a book at the time (what came to be MetaMaus), and wanted to include the CD-ROM application with the new book. Gerri thought this would be an ideal project for some students to take on. A group of students tinkered away at it as an extracurricular activity for about two years. The group worked hard at recovering the original audio recordings of Art's interviews with his father, Vladek, which only existed on deteriorating cassette tapes. They also organized the thousands of sketches that went into the making of Maus. But by May 2010, when I entered the scene, little had been accomplished in terms of building the application. Art was frustrated and doubtful that the interactive digital content would be ready in time for the publication of his new book.

Having just finished my master’s degree in digital media, I asked Gerri if I could take over the project. I was eager for a challenge and a project of significance. Maus fit the bill.

I had just started my company, 8 Leaf Digital Productions, and quickly linked up with two other graduates from the centre, Ian McDonald and Tony Cheung. We started from scratch, rebuilding the application from the ground up. With a software project, it takes a while before you can see progress. I remember our first conference call with Art. He was aghast at how little progress we had made. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that conference call was actually the beginning of a wonderful collaboration.

Soon thereafter, I went to New York and visited Art at his SoHo studio. We had made some progress on the application and I was excited to share it with him. His studio is a traditional artist’s loft, full of floor-to-ceiling bookcases and floor-to-ceiling cigarette smoke.

He wasn't happy with what I showed him. Art Spiegelman is a world-class artist and graphic designer. We spent a bleary-eyed eight hours going through the design and application. It started with Art declaring the project a mess and disaster. It ended with us sitting together, subsisting on diet coke and unsalted cashews, and figuring out how we could make it work. I left that first meeting feeling challenged and inspired.

Art is used to doing everything himself. He designs every aspect of his books down to the copyright. "Words and pictures, it's all part of the job, man," he often says. He knows how bindings are stitched and covers printed. He and his wife, Françoise Mouly, used to have an actual printing press in their apartment.

With computers, however, there's an abstraction between the design and expression. A visual design needs to be translated into code, and only then does it take on a familiar form. I was faced with the challenge of bridging this gap for Art. The task of translating his vision into code and creating an interactive work that lived up to his aesthetic and visual rigor was a daunting process.

When the book and DVD came out this October, it was a surreal experience to walk through a Chapters bookstore and see the work sitting there – not on a screen, but in real life, on a shelf. Art was adamant that the digital content be delivered through a physical object: the DVD. He wanted the book and disc to come as a package, with the book as the main artifact and the DVD its companion. He didn’t want the digital content living in “the cloud.”

MetaMaus is a beautiful book, each page measured and designed down to a fraction of an inch, so that what you see as you turn a page is planned – keeping you, the reader, in mind. This is an experience that only a book with pages can provide.

That said, the DVD has its place. It provides layers of depth, giving you access to the raw content that Art sifted and refined to tell the story of Maus. It provides insight into the process of creating Maus, the raw artifacts that Art used in his composition, and, most importantly, the audio recordings of Art’s father, Vladek. Hearing Vladek’s voice, you feel like you are suddenly in the room with Art as his father pedals on a stationary bike, working hard but going nowhere, the whirring of the wheel in the background. It’s a powerful reminder of how real this story is, a reminder of the brutality. A reminder of how complicated relationships get when a son tries to understand his father’s suffering. All of this is brought to life as you hear a young Art probing for information about death camps and numbers, locations and dates.

The DVD preserves this. It preserves it at a time when the stories of Holocaust survivors are fading into history books and a generation that didn’t experience the Holocaust is burdened with passing its stories on to a generation that won’t even know those who did. The DVD testifies to the struggle of Art’s creation, the draft after draft required to get the story right. It shows us what it means to create works of impact, but also teaches us how to tell this story so the message carries on to the next generation and the lessons are not lost.

Images courtesy of Ryan Nadel.