Now, for a Little Hedonism : From his Holocaust saga in which Jewish mice are exterminated by Nazi cats, to the New Yorker covers guaranteed to offend, to a wild party that ends in murder: Art Spiegelman’s cartoons don’t fool around.

When he was 15 years old, Art Spiegelman and a friend who also aspired to be a professional cartoonist decided to submit some of their drawings to the New Yorker. The two knew that the New Yorker was the top of the line in the realm of their ambition, and yet, as best they could tell, the cartoons in the magazine were so sophisticated they didn’t make particular sense. “So we thought the idea was to draw a cartoon you couldn’t get,” Spiegelman recalls, “and we came up with all these non sequiturs.”

None of their submissions was accepted, but 30 years later, as things worked out, Spiegelman has become one of the New Yorker’s most sensational artists, in recent years drawing illustrations for covers that are meant not just to be plainly understood but also to reach up and tattoo your eyeballs with images once unimaginable in the magazine of old moneyed taste.

This plot-worthy reversal has transpired under the reign of Tina Brown, the much-discussed British editor in chief whose noisy overhaul of the New Yorker has been every bit as graphic as it has been literary. In case you hadn’t noticed or are one of the New Yorker traditionalists who refuse to pick up the magazine these days, it now contains comic strips by Spiegelman, Edward Sorel and other artists who once toiled mainly in the pages of the nation’s “underground” and alternative media. The truth is, they are--many of them, anyway--comic strips of a high order.

In the case of Spiegelman, they are drawn by someone whose remarkable books “Maus I: A Survivors Tale” and “Maus II’--which trace his parents’ harrowing experiences in the Holocaust concentration camps and for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992--have probably done as much as anything to raise the general esteem of comics as art.

As emissary for the new New Yorker, illustrator of a just-published new book and lecturer on the history of comics, Spiegelman had reason to be in Los Angeles recently, and on the morning of the day he was to be the guest of honor at a party at Dennis Hopper’s house, he could be found near the pool on the roof of the Bel Age Hotel on Sunset, where he was staying.

Spiegelman was born in Stockholm in 1948 and raised in Brooklyn. He lived off and on in San Francisco from 1967 to 1975, “shuffling back and forth (to New York) during the psychedelic moment,” he said, but he has never spent much time in Los Angeles. On this day, he was not dressed for swimming; in fact, he was not dressed for Los Angeles at all. He was wearing a heavy herringbone tweed jacket over a heavy black shirt and was without sunglasses. Under the bare shade of a table awning, he was talking about the New Yorker; the new book, “‘The Wild Party’; the absence of a personal style in his work; “Maus, the Movie” ( not! ), and then finally “Schindler’s List,” which he didn’t like.

“You know, there was an earlier incarnation of the New Yorker which is hard to remember because it became such a suburban, Connecticut, Gentile magazine,” Spiegelman said. “But in its Ross days,” he said, referring to founding editor Harold Ross, “it was a kind of live wire--like Peter Arno’s cartoons were pretty hot for their moment. Charles Addams was considered rather morbid. It wasn’t all those cartoons about businessmen in suits talking to each other over martinis.”

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Spiegelman said that if anyone looked at a history of New Yorker covers, from the 1920s through the ‘80s, he would see how graphic design in this century has plummeted:

“The ‘20s covers were quite decorative and pretty; the ‘30s and ‘40s and even into the ‘50s the covers are great--great, great pictures. They’re not just well-constructed images, they’re arresting, they have content to them. Then, it’s a long, slow decline from the ‘50s through the ‘80s, where it’s some of these less-is-more wispy lined images on a flowerpot on a windowsill, which smacks of good breeding and good taste but to my eyes isn’t even a very exciting picture. At least graphically, I think Tina Brown’s magazine has been a total clarion call.”

Brown invited Spiegelman into the magazine not long after she succeeded Robert Gottlieb as editor in 1992. Spiegelman shortly made his presence felt with the now-famous political Valentine’s Day cover, depicting a Hasidic Jewish man kissing a black woman--a play on racial tensions in Brooklyn, particularly in the wake of the Crown Heights riots. The illustration upset members from both ethnic groups.

“I think maybe I was just really lucky that Tina was from England and didn’t understand the hornet’s nest that was being stirred up with this thing exactly,” the artist said. “She found it as benign as she ought to.”

Spiegelman himself was quite pleased with the public reaction: “It was a controversial image, and it was meant to be. It got people talking about stuff. I was very happy to see that printed images can still function that way. For the most part, the printed word and the still visual image have been sidelined in our culture. Where else is a magazine cover allowed to be not a photograph of a celebrity or at best an illustration that’s in service to the words inside the magazine as opposed to a free-standing thought by an artist?

“Now, that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t in any given issue of the New Yorker, but the fact that the New Yorker is out there taking chances makes it a very alive and lively place.”

Many are the skeptics who at this juncture in the conversation would say that given Brown’s otherwise conventional absorption with celebrities as reading and gazing matter, it can be only a matter of time before a Richard Avedon photograph of Jack Nicholson or Sharon Stone becomes the magazine’s first photo cover in 70-whatever years.

Nevertheless, Spiegelman is likely at least to have something to say about it, since he is not only a contributing editor but is married to the magazine’s art editor, Francoise Mouly. The two founded the “graphix” magazine Raw in the early ‘80s, which featured work of such artists as Drew Friedman, Gary Panter and Sue Coe, some of whom are now New Yorker contributors.

“So a lot of my talking about and consulting on the New Yorker very naturally happens with Francoise as well as with Tina,” Spiegelman said. ‘We talk about artists and features and topics that would be good and visual formats that would be exciting to try.”

They thought up the idea, for example, of sending “Zippy the Pinhead” cartoonist Bill Griffith to Aspen to cover the winter vacation scene. For the recent fashion issue, Coe did a strip about sweatshops in the Manhattan garment district.

“Francoise and I both think the best visual magazine in the history of the Western World was a French cartoon magazine called A Plate of Butter, published from 1901 to 1918 or so,” Spiegelman said. “It was an amazing magazine. It couldn’t exist in the world after television, of course. But what it was, was artists, sometimes very substantial artists, were allowed to do whatever they wanted for 16 pages or 32 pages, to give visual reports from whatever political vantage point the artist was coming from. So from week to week the magazine would lurch from left to right, and the main thing that kept it together was really great graphics.”

Spiegelman argues that since computers have altered the journalistic integrity of photographs (‘You take a photo of us sitting here and send it to the photo shop and we could be sitting on the moon after you’ve matted us into another background’), photographs are “just another graphic style” with no authority except a vestigial one. Which he believes is only good news for graphic artists, making room for them to work and compete as journalists.

“Just as prose can be written in the first person and be journalistic, I’d say that it’s possible now for artists to be working in the first person and still be giving journalistic information that has the same authority. Ultimately it might have even greater authority because you know where it’s coming from. That kind of thing is part of what’s possible at the New Yorker now.”

It is a coincidence “but a happy one,” Spiegelman said, that the 1928 narrative poem “The Wild Party’--which he has chosen to illustrate and republish (Pantheon Books)--was written by Joseph Moncure March, who was once managing editor of the New Yorker.

Spiegelman first came upon “The Wild Party” in a used bookstore in the underground comix year of 1971, when the notion that he would one day be on staff at the New Yorker and have won a Pulitzer Prize would have been the week’s best hookah dream. In any case, he said the poem’s energetic, ‘hard-boiled” sensibility grabbed him and didn’t let go. Considered slightly pornographic at the time, “The Wild Party” is an alternately playful and cynical tour in rhymed couplets of a New York showgirl’s tawdry romantic life and a party that ends in a murder. William Burroughs is said to have been influenced by it.

“What hips, what shoulders, what a back she had! Her legs were built to drive men mad.” Spiegelman recited from the poem, gripped anew by its spell and wanting to share it. He picked up the slender volume, beautifully designed (by him), and searched for another set of lines he wanted to read. He found them: “Some love is fire, some love is rust, but the fiercest, cleanest love is lust.”

“This is great stuff. It’s a book that if you fall for it at all, it goes way deep. It’s just an expression of that Lost Generation between the wars, of that kind of unsentimental world view that’s now become our basic set of glasses, from MTV to ‘Pulp Fiction’ to ‘Sesame Street.’ That attitude is the late 20th Century’s attitude, and this is the birth of it.”

In the scores of heavy black-and-white drawings he has done to illustrate the story of these lowlife vaudevillians, Spiegelman takes both a gently humorous and frankly sensual approach, matching the style of the piece itself. Where “Maus” was drawn with a rather schematic line, these figures have the look of old engravings or woodcuts.

“Insofar as I have a style,” he said, “it’s by default. What I try to do is use a surface that’s appropriate for the occasion. The point isn’t to subsume the project as an expression of my sensibility but to enter into the project as fully as possible and find out what sensibility comes out of that.”

He said he was not at all sure that people could identify his New Yorker covers from their markings alone: “I think some people say, ‘Oh, it’s got real wise-guy content, it must be Spiegelman.’ But I don’t think they can tell from the way it first looks.”

There was the one of children exiting a school bus and heading all toward their morning classrooms, armed with automatic weapons. Spiegelman? Yeah. But the cover that might have been a dead giveaway was one from last Christmas season that never ran. Spiegelman drew a guy dressed up like Santa Claus urinating against a wall, with the stain forming the shape of a Christmas tree. Behind the man was a poster that said, “Don’t forget the homeless.”

The night before the morning he was sitting on the roof of the Bel Age reciting “The Wild Party,” Spiegelman had delivered a lecture about ‘Comics as a Means of Self-Expression” at the Los Angeles Central Library downtown.

Outside the auditorium where he gave his talk, a posted notice read: ‘Please be advised Art Spiegelman will be smoking during the program and book signing.” He made good on the threat and told his sold-out audience that the two “Maus” books, which took 13 years to complete, had been delayed a year and a half by his attempt to quit smoking.

Spiegelman also told those who came to the library, among other things, that “comics are time made visible as space,” that comics are ‘the Yiddish of art,” that comics can “sear their way into your brain,” that he has no use for super-heroes in comics (‘They smell of fascism to me’) and that as the culture moves into a “post-literate moment,” comics are rising in importance.

He ran through the basic events of his own coming of age as a cartoonist, crediting the anarchic Mad magazine for overturning the sanitized Disney World that comics had become during the 1950s. “I thought of Mad magazine as an addition to the Talmud,” he said.

The artist said that he does not favor painterly comics, preferring a ‘scratchboard style” that carries readers quickly through the story rather than slow them down to marvel at the virtuosity of the drawing. That would describe the style of “Maus,” in which he made the decision to represent his parents and other Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats.

“So why did I use mice? It had something to do with Zyklon B,” he said, referring to the pesticide used by the Nazis to gas the Jews at Auschwitz. “With the idea of exterminating vermin.”

Since “Maus” was published in 1986, Spiegelman has been offered heaps of money by studios and producers who want to turn the story into a movie. He has steadfastly refused.

“It’s not that I don’t like movies, or ‘Movies, that’s not literature’--like comics is! It’s not that at all. It has more to do with the fact that ‘Maus’ took 13 years to find a specific form, with a lot of false steps, to hit a correct emotional tone. And I don’t think that can be done by any committee. There are just too many ways for this thing to become sentimental, let’s say, or on the other hand too vulgar, depending on the way one missteps.”

He said the closest he has come to taking a deal was suggesting to one producer that he might agree to sell the rights “if they will use real mice.” He has not heard back on that one.

Someone at the library asked about “Schindler’s List,” last year’s Oscar winner directed by Steven Spielberg, a film Spiegelman has criticized in the past. He replied that he “had some problems with it” and let it go at that.

But at the hotel talking to a reporter, he grew more expansive as his opinion of the movie seemed to connect with other things he was saying about aesthetic principles.

“I just don’t want to enter into a kind of sweepstakes competition over who gets to win in control of genocide,” Spiegelman said. “Hands down, Hollywood wins every time. It’s the dominant narrative mode of our culture.

“But there are problems with the film. For one thing, it tries to have it both ways. It’s a specific story based on something that happened. At the same time, it’s trying to become the definitive statement of the Holocaust--a film used in schools to teach what happened to our children. You can’t have it both ways. If it’s going to be the second, then this is the wrong story to tell, because you’re talking about an anomaly. You’re talking about a righteous Gentile of some kind. This makes people feel good, but this wasn’t what the story was about. The story was about the collapse of civilization, not about its heroic exceptions.

“That’s one kind of problem. There’s also a problem with dramatic representation that comes with this territory. What does it mean to elicit dramatic pleasure--and tears and tragedy can offer dramatic pleasure as well as comedy, and uplift and music--from so much suffering?

“There’s a scene in the movie where they think there’s going to be gas coming out of the showers and it turns out to be just water. That’s played for every ounce of emotional manipulation that can be had. There’s a very similar sequence in ‘Maus,’ because when my father was brought to Auschwitz to a place where he was going to go in the shower, and he had heard about the showers, it turned out to be a live shower. . . . It’s two panels in the book.

“See, I think that ‘Maus’ achieves its effects with no emotional manipulation, and that was very important to me. Like, all the cards are on the table, and if you cry it’s just because life is sad. The problem with ‘Schindler’s List’ ultimately is that it falls back into being a movie. So it has messages that have more to do with movie messages than actuality.

“It was important to me in ‘Maus’ not to try to make the characters heroic, not to try to make Vladek heroic,” he said, referring to the character based on his father. “To cast doubt every time a statement was made, to try to preserve the complexity, because it’s in that complexity where something can be understood.”

Then, Spiegelman said some thing that tends to get your attention coming from a cartoonist. He said, “I ask that you not caricature my position on ‘Schindler’s List.’ Because I really don’t want to go one on one with Steven Spielberg about this or become a spokesperson again. I think ‘Maus’ is its own response to the events that happened and can function for those who dig further for more information than what ‘Schindler’s List’ is offering.”

In closing, asked if he were going to draw anything about Los Angeles, he replied quizzically: “About my trip here? Not unless I do one strip I’ve been thinking about that has to do with being a smoker on a book tour. Even last night, the contortions that had to be arranged for this thing to happen at all, with a very hip fire marshal who was able to find a loophole.”

Spiegelman discovered that, when it wants to be, L.A. is still a can-do town.*