In "Breakdowns," Art Spiegelman depicts his self-portrait as a young wild man who loves colorful comic books above all else and constantly draws comics. In San Francisco, he discovers the circle around Robert Crumb and the subversion of a genre: the underground comics explode the American Dream in sarcastic speech bubbles. Spiegelman dissects Dick Tracy and the Katzenjammer Kids, learns from the camera movements and quick cuts of experimental film, until he ultimately tells the story of his mother's suicide in expressionistic scratchboard art. He learns to pack everything into small boxes and to gift the reader with visual factories, finding the narrative rhythm with which he can document the story of his parents, both of whom survived Auschwitz: "Maus" is born, the book that transformed cult into art.