Spiegelman’s Low Modernism A seemingly minor episode in Françoise Mouly’s biography holds special significance for the intersection of comics and the avant-garde during Art Spiegelman’s early career. In 1975, having arrived in New York with only $200 in her pocket and eager to improve her English by reading comics, Mouly had a part in Richard Foreman’s play Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation, performed by his Ontological-Hysteric Theater at 491 Broadway. Despite her shaky command of...

© 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press “An enormous cap of dark grey smoke above the Extinct City in the Capital maintains, with the weight of its material, the reality of the fiction that is the emptiness: the City in the City, the City that no longer is.” —Stanisław Śreniowski, a Jewish historian living in hiding on the “Aryan” side, recalling the Ghetto Uprising [1] In the courtyard behind the apartment building at 55 Sienna Street, one can still visit a rare fragment of the wall that, for a...