Long-time cartoonist Art Spiegelman is best known for Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, a graphical memoir of his father’s experiences during the Holocaust, a story where the Jews were portrayed by mice, while cats stood in for Nazis. The acclaim has followed Spiegelman for the past few decades, even when he starred as himself in an episode of The Simpsons, as he strapped on a Maus-inspired mask and declared “Maus is in the house!” before joining fellow comic legends Daniel Clowes (of Ghost World fame) and Alan Moore (the eccentric genius behind Watchmen and V For Vendetta) in beating the snot out of Comic Book Guy, Springfield’s hapless plus-side nerd.

Two decades ago, Spiegelman was not a household name, except perhaps for households with piles of underground comics. Back then, many of his comic stories were collected in Breakdowns: From Maus To Now. “[It] was published in 1978, against all odds,” Spiegelman reminisces. “There was no demand for a deluxe large-format album that collected the scattered handful of short autobiographical and structurally ‘experimental’ comics I’d made between 1972 and 1977 – except by me.” Today, the book has been re-released by Pantheon Books as Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! ($27.50), with new material relating to the original volume.

Anybody who originally was exposed to Maus from Spiegelman’s two volumes (My Father Bleeds History and And Here My Problems Began) will be surprised to see that the first Maus tale from 1972 has more of a cartoonish vibe than the later version. The three-page story is still harrowing, as a mouse stand-in for Spiegelman’s father tells his son “Mickey” about how “Die Katzen” forced the mice into the ghetto and eventually into “Mauschwitz.” Also on the heavy side is “Prisoner On The Hell Planet,” which deals with the suicide of Spiegelman’s mother, and the overwhelming guilt he felt about rejecting her before she died. Most of the other stories are experimental in nature. For instance, “Cracking Jokes” takes a simple joke about a man who thinks he’s dead, and breaks it down to its basic parts, such as the historical need for man’s ancestors to mock the weak, the implied impotence of court jesters, and stereotypical roles in jokes. “Little Signs Of Passion” tells a story of two people that might fall in love and the bully that would come between them, and then is retold as a longer tale with a quotation from author Jack Woodford about story structure, as Spiegelman throws in a few photorealistic sex scenes. Other stories includes eleven panels on a single page that can be looped almost endlessly (“A Day At The Circuits”), the author’s tale of his move back to New York where cockroaches seemingly pop up more often as the story progresses and gets grungier, and a two-page story where panels from the Rex Mason comic strip are appropriated and repositioned in bizarre and humorous ways.

The original Breakdowns is separated from the rest of the book with glossy pages. Before the reader gets to that, Speigelman offers comic strips from the recent past, relating to the inspirations behind his career and stories, as well as how they last into the present. For instance, an offhand comment from his wife Françoise is shown to have led to the creation of “Prisoner On The Hell Planet,” while another brief strip shows Spiegelman looking through old family photos, getting a bolt of pain remembering his mother’s suicide, a pain he didn’t expect. Several strips deal with a young Spiegelman’s early love of alternative comics, from his first exposure to Mad Magazine and his first attempts to draw stories (one of which he signed with a “suave Anglicized name”) to getting a taste of comics printed before the backlash against the industry from his unsuspecting father. Maus is also represented, its origins dating back to when Spiegelman sat in on cinema class. After seeing cartoon characters related with minstrels (“This jazz-age Mickey Mouse,” notes his mentor, “is just Al Jolson with big ears!”), he comes up with an idea for an underground comic (Funny Aminals) involving lynched mice and “Ku Klux Kats,” but then he realized he knows “bupkis about being black in America.” When Spiegelman shows his father and friends the material based on their lives, they immediately get drawn to it, not noticing the cats and mice. The afterword features Spiegelman going over Breakdowns, and it includes more of his older material, including an advertisement for the book.

While Spiegelman still has a few good years left in him, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! shows where he came from, and it’s a trip any serious independent comic fan should take.