There were different needs. The earlier work, Prisoner on the Hell Planet, used the visual conventions of German expressionism for the kind of heightened emotionality that seemed organically connected to my dealing with my mother's suicide, an experience I was assimilating even as I was telling it. MAUS had different requirements. I was getting a transmission I was transmitting further, and that required, all else aside, a greater degree of neutrality on the visual surface than Prisoner on the Hell Planet. The text that came with the Drawn to Text exhibit made an interesting point about how in Europe the distinctions between high and low culture were less fixed.
Comics start out as more of an outcast form in America.
People known as painters worked as graphics artists as well. In some ways that freed comics here, freed them from having to be art. You alluded to MAUS being an instance of postmodernism that has not yet eschewed morality. There's a kind of morality to The Wild Party as well. I think about The Wild Party as the libido unchained.