There is a brief article in the Examiner today about the March 8th New Yorker magazine cover done by Art Spiegelman, the one underground comix artist to win the Pulitzer-Prize for his Maus series of books.

That was always a little surprising. I remember talking with him at his place in San Francisco one afternoon in the early 1970's not that long after his first Maus book had been published, wondering what reaction he'd experienced here in San Francisco as well as his home in New York City.

The Maus comix were based on a series of conversations Spiegelman had had with his father, a Holocaust survivor, with Spiegelman relating his father's experiences with the Nazis and the concentration camps. The book(s), certainly, are a serious and respectful examination of the Holocaust at a very personal level and anyone reading them would understand that, but the format is the comic book and the underground comix scene was not generally considered a serious arena for such discussion.

My question for him was how people had reacted to the book. It had been out for a few months by then, I forget who had published it, but I'd wondered if there had been any negative feelings expressed by friends or members of his family. He'd taken quite a jump into the dark, the proper thing for an artist, but he'd chosen the Holocaust as a subject and that made it a long jump indeed and a darker piece of dark.

He understood and no, the reception had been positive, what feedback he'd had so far. I was there to talk with him about another comix artist at the request of a friend in New York who needed some information for a piece she was doing for New York magazine so we went on to talk about that.

Spiegelman has come some way since, the Maus books eventually resulting in the Pulitzer-Prize. I think if I suggested such a thing back then sitting in his apartment in the Mission district he would have given me an incredulous laugh.

Life is strange, seeing what has become of that underground artist's world, what things succeeded, what things didn't, what things grew and into what.