Arthur spiegelman is an American Comics artist he was born in Stockholm Sweden in 1948 and immigrated to New York City with his parents when he was little he became a major figure in the underground Comics movement of the 60s and 70s and co-founded two significant Comics Anthology Publications arcade with Bill Griffith in San Francisco during the early 70s and raw with his wife French artist franois muli in 1980 in addition to being named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2005 and his September 24th 2001 cover for the New Yorker magazine being voted in the top 10 magazine covers of the past 40 years spiegelman is probably best known for his masterful Holocaust narrative Memoir Mouse the only graphic novel ever to win a peer prize the Topeka and shauny County Public Library has copies of mouse that you can check out but we also own a lithograph created by Art Spielman based on this book called Crossroads in order to really understand what this piece is about let's first start with getting familiar with spiegelman's graphic novel Mouse the term graphic novel simply put is a book length comic where comic books stretch a story out to about 30 pages graphic novels can be as long as 600 Pages or more Mouse is the story of lodic spiegelman a Jewish Survivor of Adolf Hitler's Europe and his son art a cartoonist who tries to to come to terms with his father his father's terrifying story and history itself depicting the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice spiegelman uses the medium of cartoon to recount his father's painful and horrifying memories and experiences in one of the Nazis most notorious death camps aitz and how survival becomes an ongoing lifelong struggle with far-reaching effects well into the Next Generation printed at tandem press in Madison Wisconsin Crossroads was purchased in 2000 by former sabatini Gallery director Larry Peters from the ster Nelson gallery in Manhattan Kansas in this haunting image we see spiegelman's parents standing at the center of a Crossroads which has taken the shape of a swastika an ancient symbol adopted by Hitler's Nazi party in 1920 and transformed into a potent icon of racial hatred and genocide the image is similar to a scene from Mouse one when Arts parents attempt to escape the Polish ghetto of schula by blending in with the local Polish people in the top leftand corner is a reproduction of Gustav D's Wandering Jew the wandering jew is a figure from medieval Christian folklore whose Legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century about a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth wandering without the hope of rest and death it made its way into popular culture in reference to the wandering Jewish race and has thus been made a vehicle for anti-Semitism spiegelman altered this slightly by casting a mouse as the wandering jew note that Christ is still human which brings to mind a chilling quote from Hitler the Jews are undoubtedly a race but they are not human here the image of the wandering jew is fused within the image of his parents at a Crossroads this could symbolize the impossibility of escape from this negative cultural stereotype that the Nazis manipulated to gain support for anti-Semitism it's as if spiegelman's parents have the burden of the wandering jew embedded into their own story and it comes to determine their very path throughout the mouse story spiegelman weaves in and out of the past and present which can be inferred by spiegelman's placement of the present a depiction of the artist hailing a New York taxi cab with his two children which floats over the background or his parents story this visual layering of moments and time illustrates memory the things closer to us in the print represent moments closer to us in time based on the imagery and the title Crossroads spielman's parents are at a four-point intersection deciding which direction to take unbeknownst to them though their path is already determined as they are too low to the ground to see the shape of things around them literally the swastika regardless of which direction they choose they cannot escape the Nazis plan and only we the viewers have the visual and historical perspective to see that their path for escape is feudal AR spieglan is important because he's shown that literature in sequential art format can be a powerful medium for communication and education and that Comics don't exist simply to make us laugh or entertain children but ultimately Mouse and Crossroads are important because Mouse is a story about a family that could be yours or your next door neighbor Mouse and its companion piece Crossroads with their deceptively simple Comics format managed to bring home the horror of a tragedy that's been dled by familiarity and the distance of time these works of art are a reminder never to forget