Art Spiegelman has been an influential figure in the comics world since the 1960's. As well as producing his own experimental comics, he co-edited the ground breaking magazines Arcade and RAW. In 1992, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Maus, the story of his father's war-time experiences living under the Nazi regime. More details here.

If you know of any other comic-related reading recommendations made by Art Spiegelman in interviews or articles we would love to hear from you. Please provide a scan and/or link if possible.
Email: recommended [at] readyourselfraw [dot] com

Tijuana Bibles: Art & Wit in America's Forbidden Funnies, 1930s-1950s
by Bob Adelman
"Cartoons have a way of crawling past our critical radar and getting right into the id. It may be that their reductive diagramatic qualities echo the way the brain sorts information. This subversive knack for lodging memorably in the deepest crevices of the psyche has never been more clearly demonstrated than by the genre of comic-book pamphlets sometimes known as Tijuana Bibles that first flourished in the thirties. They were cheerfully pornographic and downright illegal. From today's perspective, part of the early Tijuana Bibles' appeal lies in their peculiar combination of debauchery and innocence. Perhaps because the blue-collar sexual environment they were hatched in was so oppressive, they didn't usually venture into the truly outré and kinky sado-masochistic domains that pervade much of today's popular culture, let alone contemporary hard-core pornography. They seem to marvel at the very idea of sex... They portray a buoyant, priapic world in which lust overcomes everything, even bad drawing, bad grammar, bad jokes and bad printing."
From the introduction

Donald Duck & Uncle Scrooge
by Carl Barks
"I loved Carl Barks' work since those days of long-lost innocence when I assumed the duck stories were all written and drawn by Walt Disney himself. As far as I was concerned, they were Walt's best work, done on lunch-breaks, when he wasn't making animated cartoons or hosting his weekly TV show. Before that I just believed the ducks were somehow real, and now, as an adult I've reverted to my first opinion: the ducks ARE real. Not the way they look, of course, but they're emotionally real, realer than most people I've met."
From the foreword to The Unexpurgated Carl Barks

Schizo
by Ivan Brunetti
"I enjoyed watching you suffer - keep on whining!"
From a letter in Schizo #2

Facetasm
by Charles Burns & Gary Panter
"Contorted cut-ups that'll make your head split open. It's a pleasure to see two of my favourite artists' worlds collide."
From the back cover blurb

Eightball
by Dan Clowes
"Curdlingly good…"
From the back cover blurb to the Lout Rampage collection

Plastic Man
by Jack Cole
"Although I'm slightly embarrassed to confess to being in love with a superhero comic, Jack Cole's Plastic Man belongs high on any adult's How To Avoid Prozac list, up there with the best of S. J. Perelman, Laurel and Hardy, Damon Runyon, Tex Avery, and The Marx Brothers. Cole's comics have helped me feel reconciled to the misleading word ‘comic‘, which often keeps my medium of choice from getting any respect."
From an article originally published in The New Yorker

The Complete Crumb Comics
by Robert Crumb
"The most influential of the underground cartoonists, Robert Crumb (b. 1943) seemed to reinvent comic books. His fantasies were not mass-produced pre-adolescent superhero power fantasies, but pimply post-adolescent sex fantasies – the Dreams of an Acid Fiend, with at least one foot planted in the grim real world. His drawings synthesize many of the best stylistic elements of the past. His stories, often without punch lines, are quirky, personal and disturbing."
From the article Comix: An Idiosyncratic Historical And Aesthetic Overview

The Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
by Kim Deitch
"At last the general public will be allowed to discover Kim Deitch, one of the best-kept secrets in comics for over thirty-five years. He's an American Original, a spinner of yarns whose beautifully structured pages and intricate plots conjure up a haunting and haunted American past."
From the back cover blurb

Flood!
by Eric Drooker
"[Flood!] is a complex, dream-charged vision of alienation in the wet, mean streets of New York City , where primal natural urges are suppressed in the lonely isolation of crowds. It's a picture of a soulless civilization headed toward the apocalypse. It's a poetic and lyrical novel – told virtually without words… Since images are usually open to broader interpretation than prose, each drawing in the sequence must work not only as a self-centered composition but also as a kind of hieroglyphic picture-writing. The page acts as a curtain to be raised, each page offered up new visual surprises… Mr Drooker has discovered the magic of pulling light and life out of an inky sea of darkness."
From the back cover blurb

The Spirit
by Will Eisner
"… Will Eisner (born 1917) brought major innovations and insight to comic book storytelling. Influenced by German Expressionist set design and Hollywood noir films, his Spirit stories had a stylish moodiness. The 1940's strip crackled with the energy of an artist consumed with the excitement of cascading new ideas…The Spirit logos were often incorporated into the decor: panels could be designed to look literally like postage stamps, or film frames complete with sprocket holes, or like a series of posters on a brick wall. The opening ‘splash’ pages were laid out to look like book jackets, parodies of other comics, wanted posters, front pages of newspapers, advertisements, even IRS forms. His experiments and discoveries went far beyond the trick opening pages. Eagerly making "movies on paper" he even seemed to find visual devices to bring the soundtracks to the page, even camera movements."
From the article Comix: An Idiosyncratic Historical And Aesthetic Overview

The Kin-der-Kids
by Lyonel Feininger
"Between 1906 and 1907 he produced two features totaling only 51 pages for the Chicago Tribune. His career as a comic strip artist lasted less than a year and was a commercial fizzle, but his pages achieved a breathtaking formal grace unsurpassed in the history of the medium. He brought the sophisticated modernist currents then coursing through European art into the fledgling Funny Pages."
From a review of The Comic Strip Art Of Lyonel Feininger

Binky Brown Sampler
by Justin Green
"I owe Justin Green a whooping big debt. You see, without Binky Brown there would be no Maus. I guess one point of my pentagon-shaped Pulitzer prize belongs to him… Justin profoundly changed the history of comix. Like his somewhat better-known peers, Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson, he pioneered brand new territory for comix to colonise. Crumb made comix boxes into incendiary surprise packages that could no longer be counted on to predictably contain escapist superheroics or formulaically snappy punch lines; Wilson made his panels into crowded Pandora's boxes that unleashed nihilistic id-monsters and hardcore checkered demons into the world… and Justin turned comic book boxes into intimate secular confession booths. It's no small thing to invent a genre"
From the introduction

Krazy Kat
by George Herriman
"The Poet Laureate of comics, of course, was George Herriman (1880–1944) – or more accurately the Comics Laureate. Krazy Kat wasn't much like anything that ever happened in any other medium… Herriman worked variations on a deceptively simple theme for over thirty years. In one of literature's more peculiar love triangles, Krazy Kat's love with Ignatz Mouse who, loving no one but himself, finds no greater pleasure than 'kreasing that kat's bean with a brick.' Though intended as an act of aggression Krazy receives the brick as a sign of love. Offissa Pup is in love with Krazy (who loves everyone) and quite naturally hates Ignatz, who he regularly incarcerates in a jail made of… bricks… Herriman's genius allowed him to give his theme the weight of a poetic symbol. For some it is a strip about Democracy, for others about Love and Sex, for others still about Heaven and Hell. For all, it is about a cat getting hit with a brick."
From the article Comix: An Idiosyncratic Historical And Aesthetic Overview

Paul Auster's City Of Glass
adapted by Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli
"By poking at the heart of comics structure, Karasik and Mazzucchelli created a strange doppelganger of the original book. It's as if Quinn, confronted with two nearly identical Peter Stillmans at Grand Central Station, chose to follow one drawn with brush and ink rather than one set in type. The volume that resulted, first published in 1994, overcame all my purist notions about collaboration. It offers one of the richest demonstrations to date of the modern Ikonologosplatt at its most subtle and supple."
From the introduction

Master Race
by Bernard Krigstein
"Krigstein, an illustrator and painter, had a relatively brief but significant comic book career. He realised that the potential of the medium lay in the way the breakdowns could shape time. Using graphic techniques borrowed from modern painting as well as illustration, his work was cool, analytic and intellectual. His eight page Master Race, a 1955 attempt at coming to grips with the horrors of the Third Reich, is one of the greatest achievements in comics."
From the article Comix: An Idiosyncratic Historical And Aesthetic Overview

The GrassHopper & The Ant
by Harvey Kurtzman
"Harvey Kurtzman, the inventor of MAD, was 90% workaholic ant and 10% pure Anarchist Grasshopper. The result was a 100% Cool Cat who composed comix with Duke Ellington's grace, Dizzy Gillespie's wit and Charlie Parker's originality. Dig it!"
From the back cover blurb

Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book
by Harvey Kurtzman
"This is one book I'd even pay for, if it came to that, even though I'm one of the lucky few owners of a copy of the original 1959 paperback. Like most of the other copies I've seen, mine is more like a murkily printed newsprint portfolio. Ballantine Books' cheap glue binding is just a memory. I keep all the loose yellowed pages in a plastic bag. I've handled these pages with all the care due a sacred text, but my copy just won't bear up under many more re-readings… The drawing alone would make this book worth reprinting. Nowhere else is there such a large body of Kurtzman's own drawing…I've always thought that Kurtzman's most important contribution has been in shaping (or, should I say, warping?) the minds of a generation of innocent American children. He taught them to think, to not confuse media reality with real reality."
From the introduction

Fires
by Lorenzo Mattotti
"... there was a moment when I got really excited by Lorenzo Mattotti's work because I'd only seen comics like his in my dreams, things that had that kind of light and shade, texture, and a knowledgeability about what can happen inside a rectangle that I associate more readily with great painters rather than cartoonists. Fires was a breakthrough book."
From an interview, The Comics Journal #180

Little Nemo In Slumberland
by Winsor McCay
"It's amazing to me! So many otherwise educated people have never even heard of Winsor McCay. He was one of our first and best comic strip artists, and one of the founding fathers of film animation… Maybe he's been neglected because he worked in the ‘low‘ arts and popular art has never been meant to leave a trace after its moment of popularity passes. But McCay convincingly mapped out the mind's inner dreamscape decades before ant ‘surrealist‘ draped a melted clock on a tree. His Little Nemo In Slumberland was a genteel masterpiece among the raucous – often crude – early newspaper strips, a vivid evocation of childhood fantasies."
From an appreciation published in The Best Of Little Nemo In Slumberland

Understanding Comics
by Scott McCloud
"Cleverly designed as an easy-to-read comic book, Scott McCloud's simple looking tome deconstructs the secret language of comics while casually revealing secrets of Time, Space, Art and the Cosmos! The most intelligent comics I've seen in a long time. Bravo."
From the back cover blurb

Watchmen
by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
"For better and for worse, Alan Moore is very interested in structures, and that kind of structuring is what made Watchmen stand apart from other books. It's not the dystopic vision, it's not the Twilight Zone ending, it's the fact that there's something formally at work there that you're only peripherally aware of, as you're reading through this thing, that gives weight and authority to what's being told."
From an interview, The Comics Journal #180

Barefoot Gen
by Keiji Nakazawa
"Gen haunts me. The first time I read it was in the late 1970's, shortly after I'd begun working on Maus. I has the flu at the time and read it while high on fever. Gen burned its way into my heated brain with all the intensity of a fever-dream. I've found myself remembering images and events from the Gen books with a clarity that made them seem like memories from my own life rather than Nakazawa's… Gen deals with the trauma of the atom bomb without flinching. There are no irradiated Godzillas or super-mutants, only tragic realities."
From the introduction

Spy vs Spy
by Antonio Prohias
"…I've come to appreciate Prohias's variation-on-a-narrow-theme school of comics (in its highest incarnations it brought us Krazy Kat and the Road Runner cartoons), and his black-and-white Spies are universal signs. They are, in fact, the comic-strip equivalent of the yin and yang symbol, good and evil, interdependent and interchangeable, forever chasing after each other's tails. Spy vs Spy seemed hermetically sealed off in a world of its own, though it was a direct result of the Cold War and its displacements."
From an appreciation published in Spy vs Spy The Complete Casebook

Joe's Bar
by Munoz & Sampayo
"Joe's Bar is a way station on the boulevard of broken dreams, a dark harbour for slowly sinking ships, a lost-and-found center for lost souls trying to find themselves in a violent world. The air is smoky and smells of Raymond Chandler's cigarettes, but there are no heroes looking for a way out of the labyrinth of their own alienation, a way to survive twenty-four more hours. There's a profound sadness and tenderness in these stories of a haunting kind never seen in comics before. Munoz and Sampayo work like one brain with two bodies: Sampayo's stories are elliptical and subtle; Munoz powerful, expressionist drawings take dazzling risks. There are no clichés here, only comics that dare you to look think and feel."
From the back cover blurb

C'Était la Guerre des Tranchées (War Of The Trenches)
by Jacques Tardi
"Jacques Tardi finally has his World War I story out in a book... It's as good as anything can be. This was great, this was All's Quiet On The Western Front. This was the real goods."
From an interview, The Comics Journal #180

The Bloody Streets Of Paris
by Jacques Tardi
"Tardi does for comics what the New Wave French film-makers of the 60's did for Cinema. Like them, he re-invents old pulp forms, finding their central poetry and existential truths. He serves them up with a playful self-aware intelligence that is always filled with respect and affection for the trashy sources. He is one of the single most influential comix artists to come out of the French adult comics revolution of the 70's. His drawing is always a masterful balancing act between abstract graphic design on the one hand and keen reportorial detail on the other. It's a hard trick to pull off, and it's all Pure Comics. That is, Tardi always keeps the story-telling function of his pictures foremost… No comix artist has ever captured a Sense of Place with greater skill."
From the introduction

Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid On Earth
by Chris Ware
"It's uncanny to think that someone so young would have such an apparent recollection of the history of comics and the talent to expand upon it."
From the advertising blurb for ACME novelty Library #10

"... I think Chris Ware is one of the best cartoonists working. I'm impressed with what he's doing."
From an interview, The Comics Journal #180

"This is like welcoming James Joyce into the ranks of novel writers. This new book seems to be another milestone in the demonstration of what [comics] can be."
From an interview at Time.com