Prisoner on a Hell Planet

Have you ever walked out on your mother after a fight, not knowing that would be the last time you ever see her? How guilty would you feel for not making your last moments worthwhile? 

Close your eyes. Imagine it's a late summer night. Imagine your mother comes into your room and asks for a goodnight's kiss. Would you blow her off, or would you return her kiss?

Ok, so you blew her off. Now what? The next night you go over your girlfriend's house, and you don't come back until late. There's a crowd of people outside of your house, but you don't even want to imagine the worse. "No, it can't be. There's no way," you reassure yourself.

Next thing you know, you're at a funeral. Your mother lays dead in an open casket in front of you. She has killed herself and left no note. Now, open your eyes.

Fortunately, you are not at your mother's funeral, and none of this actually happened. For Art Spiegelman, this story is a reality.

The year is 1968, and a young Art Spiegelman is just relieved from Binghamton State Mental Hospital. He gets out after what he describes as a "casual" LSD addiction. Not long after he comes home, his mother Anja commits suicide.

It's a little less than twenty years later, and Artie visits his father to help him fix the roof. Vladek is obviously upset about something, so Artie goes to the kitchen to see Mala. She shows him his underground comic, Prisoner on a Hell Planet, which is a story about his mother's suicide.

Artie is surprised that his father read the comic, since he doesn't even read Artie's work when Artie "sticks it underneath his nose." This comic was different. This comic was personal.

According to Mala, the comic was very "accurate", which she knows since she spent a lot of time helping out around the house after Anja's funeral. For Vladek, the story brought up memories of Anja, but he was happy that Artie got it "out of his system."

The comic is very different from the rest of the book. Everyone seems like zombies, and it looks like it takes place in hell. Just look at Vladek. His eye sockets are dark as night and he looks lifeless. It's as if Anja took Vladek's life with her in the suicide.

For another thing, the characters are humans and not mice. Why?

Artie didn't live through the Holocaust, so he actually couldn't show us how it was. This is one of the reasons I believe he uses mice. He acknowledges that he is a second generation survivor, so he cannot use humans to accurately retell the story. Anja's suicide, on the other hand, is something he actually lived through. It is something he experienced in person and wants to show us what it was actually like.  

Artie's intends for us to think of the characters as humans even when they are represented with mice heads. This makes the story more real. He uses actual humans in Prisoner on a Hell Planet to make the story even more synonymous with reality. In a nutshell, Prisoner on a Hell Planet is Artie's haunting memory of his mother's suicide and is an inspiration to his work.