To be fair, you'd be hard pushed to find a significant name in the more experimental end of comics from the '80s who didn't appear in
RAW. Not to mention its superb record of reprinting work by earlier giants like Winsor McCay and George Herriman. If an exhibition was otherwise poorly curated but had a load of prime
RAW material it would still be absolutely fantastic.
Now, Art Spiegelman released Maus in two parts and the rumor that I hear all the time is that he was angry about An American Tail which is also about Jewish mice. I can't confirm this rumor but it's not really important. Since the first volume was released in 1986 and the second released in 1991, do you think the impact of the story was at all affected due to having to wait five years for the conclusion?
It wasn't quite on that schedule.
Maus was mostly serialised in
RAW before the collected editions (the final issue has the penultimate chapter, I'm assuming the last one first appeared in
And Here My Troubles Began). I'm not sure when Vol.1 No.2 of
RAW was published but it must have been roughly a decade between
Maus' first appearance and the conclusion. It's hard to gauge how the publishing schedule would have impacted on a contemporary reader. I can remember reading
My Father Bleeds History and some of the later
RAW chapters without access to
And Here My Troubles Began but I wasn't reading them as they came out, and the massive impact it had on me is impossible to separate from my being ten or eleven at the time and this being the first holocaust narrative I'd ever read. It's hard not to think of it as one coherent whole now, although I can recall the desire for more, to see the story finished. A bit like two of Primo Levi's great autobiographical accounts of the holocaust,
If This Is A Man and
The Truce. More than a decade separates the publishing of the two books but I've only ever encountered them as one volume, and I can't imagine them separated.
Do you think that because the people are portrayed as animals it opens itself up to a younger audience or do you think that it remains unaffected.
Probably. Anthropomorphised animals are a familiar concept for children and I think that coupled with comics being seen as a suitable form for something a child would read. Whether or not it's inherently more accessible for children I think it does make it something more people would find it appropriate to give a child to read. I remember I was told I could read
Maus in
RAW but I shouldn't be reading the rest of it (naturally I lied and lapped up Kaz, Lynda Barry, Chris Ware and the rest).
Were comics/graphic novels considered at this time to be important works of art or were they simply all comics? Did this affect the turning point where comics became a valuable and recognized art form?
I'm not sure comics are a valued art form in the same way novels and cinema are.
Maus, with its widespread critical recognition, has certainly helped but there also seems to be a problem in that a large number of other comic books to receive widespread and serious critical attention subsequently are in some way similar to
Maus (
Fun Home as biography, Sacco's accounts of conflicts etc) or are by Alan Moore. There's a ton of reasons why that's the case, although it does seem to be getting better.