Art Spiegelman Retrospective at Jewish Museum In museums, we look all the time at drawings, prints and illustrated books from the past, art forms that entertain us with stories but also embody history. Modern comics, at their best, do this too, often with immense sophistication. Do we see them in museums? Hardly ever. Art Spiegelman Art Spiegelman's Co-Mix a selection from the comic master's works on display at the Jewish Museum. An installation view of the original drawing for Art Spiegelman's many-layered, book-length, autobiographical comic, "Maus." So it was a big moment when the New York cartoonist Art Spiegelman had a solo at the Museum of Modern Art in 1991, even if the show had limits. It was installed in a small lobby gallery reserved for the museum's "Projects" series. And it consisted of just one work, the artist's book-length pictorial narrative, "Maus." Back then, Mr. Spiegelman, who was in his 40s, already had a long and influential career in drawing, publishing, editing and mentoring behind him. And now, more than 20 years on, we finally get a look at its breadth and depth in "Art Spiegelman's Co-Mix: A Retrospective," a survey that originated in Europe, traveled to Canada and is making its single United States appearance at the Jewish Museum. With a half-century's worth of work, mostly drawings, it's a big spread of small, detailed things, many requiring reading. But there's rarely a dull moment. Mr. Spiegelman has always been a restless, not to say wired experimenter, groove-aversive. Scan any wall in the show and you pass through varied visual and psychic zones. He was born in Sweden in 1948, the child of World War II concentration camp survivors. He grew up in Queens, and was a comics prodigy. He drew his first strip, "The Loonies," at 12 (it's in the show), published a parodic zine, "Blasé," while in high school and sold his first drawing to a newspaper at 17. He cut his teeth on the wacko anarchy of MAD magazine and got high on the psychedelic gross-outs of Zap Comix. In his early drawings you see who he was looking at: Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Basil Wolverton. You also see him siphoning off what he needed and giving it his own, often political spin. And, a born pluralist, he was in many places at once. That's one reason his early work feels hyper and exciting: You never know - he never knew - quite what's coming next. One thing that came, almost unbidden, was the novel use of autobiography as content. In 1968, he was briefly hospitalized with a breakdown. His mother, Anja, committed suicide the same year. In 1973, he recorded these traumas in an extended strip, "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," for which he invented a dark, hatching-intensive scratchboard style, airless, highly expressive. Another artist might have built a portfolio on it. He used it once, then moved on. He moved with some caution. As early as 1966, he took on steady bread-and-butter jobs. He designed trading cards and Garbage Pail Kids stickers for Topps Chewing Gum. He became a regular contributor to Playboy. The income bought him freedom to do his own work, which was heading away from 1960s pop culture. In 1980, with his wife, Françoise Mouly, he started a magazine, RAW, which approached comics as an avant-garde art medium and welcomed young practitioners like Gary Panter, Sue Coe and Chris Ware, whose work was finding its way into galleries. RAW gave Mr. Spiegelman himself a platform for trying new things at his own pace, which was never fast. A sequence of 13 sketches he did for a single cover illustration demonstrates his method: Develop an idea by increment, revise and revise. It was in RAW that he initially published "Maus," a chapter at a time. Eventually issued as a book, "Maus" is one of the great word-and-image creations of the late 20th century. On the one hand, it's a factual account - told in his father's words - of the beyond harrowing experiences of his parents as Jews in Poland in World War II. At the same time, it's a fantastic invention. The setting keeps shifting back and forth from 1940s Europe to 1970s New York. Different stories layer up, interweave: The war in Europe finds an echo in Mr. Spiegelman's adult conflicts with his father, Vladek. "Art Spiegelman's Co-Mix: A Retrospective" will run through March 23 at the Jewish Museum 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street; (212) 423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org.